A bad design that led to a disaster and a good design that prevented one (or 2 smaller good ones...)

The bad design

Probably the most infamous bad design that I can think of is that of the Hawaii alert system and the 2018 disaster it led to. There are two conflicting accounts of how everything went down, but the common denominator in both is that the software being used was of very low quality and didn’t have any type of double verification, sadly there are no actual screenshots of available online, but buy looking at the examples provided by the official sources it isn’t hard to understand why such a mistake could have been made.

The first version is that an employee went rouge, some say due to an un-diagnosed mental illness, and turned a unplanned drill into an actual alert, resulting in 38 minutes of absolute horror for the citizens, I have read multiple harrowing accounts from the people there:

  • A mother who didn’t wake her children, deciding to let them perish peacefully in their sleep

  • A family who just sat down on the beach to enjoy their last moments together

  • Large amounts of people who broke down crying and where traumatized

(Note that I have no sources for these accounts, as I couldn’t find them for some reason, but I when this incident happened I do remember reading them so have decided to include them)

Form the critiques that I read, one of the points that was brought up a couple of times was that if the software was designed in such a way that it would require confirmation from multiple then the whole incident could have been avoided.

The second version that I have read about is that everything can be blamed on to simple terrible software design, the different modes of the alarm can be selected via a simple drop-down menu, and what happened was that instead of a test the actual alarm was selected, and only when one of the workers heard the radio broadcast that they realized that the wrong alarm was selected.


A good design

For some reason I wasn’t able to locate a single solid example of a good design that was able to prevent a disaster, so I have decided to include two small scale examples instead.

The first one I would like to point to is one that probably helps save people everyday, but I wasn’t able to locate anything about it, it is that external doors open outwards (+the push side of the door doesn't have a handle), in case of a fire when a large amount of people rush for the exit if it doesn’t open outwards then there is a chance that the door could get blocked up by the people, and result in more casualties then should have been.

The second one that I one to point out is the technology invented by SawStop, I have seen multiple videos where people who have been hurt using power-tools talk about safety, and one of the biggest one that they point to is the power saw, it can easily take of fingers and maim hands. Well SawStop came up with a technology that when skin comes in contact with a saw, the saw violently retracts into the table and comes to a stop, saving fingers and hands.


In conclusion, good design will mostly go unappreciated, as my inability to find a good example points to, as a good design will be intuitive to the users, making them basically ignore the good designs under the assumption that it should always be this way.

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