Alarm fatigue or alert fatigue is a fundamental concept in HMI design. I deal more in the industrial side of things, and I’ve been in the field long enough that I remember when management figured every alarm should always be #1 priority, because why else have alarms? Only thing is if an operator is getting 1000 alarms in a 12 hour shift, the truly important alarms will just be lost in the noise, and a wood chip gets stuck in the acknowledge button while they deal with alarm #382.
My #1 complaint with this amber alert though was that silencing it involved clearing it. There was a fair amount of text in the alarm body, but my phone was screaming at me, so I hit the OK button to silence it… and all the text is gone. The second alarm at 11 pm wasn’t any better, but at least I had searched the alarm. This is (I believe) a function of the phone software though, not the government body pushing the alarm. I don’t think alarm fatigue is too much of an issue, these were the first two emergency alerts I’ve gotten on my phone in a while.
Having said that, considering the time the mother and children had been missing, they could easily have made it to my corner of the province, or I might conceivably have seen the vehicle or something earlier in the week when I was in the Okanagan. I would have just appreciated it not continuously wailing at me while I desperately grab my phone. Regardless of what anyone considers about the validity of them receiving this Amber alert, at least on my phone, the Emergency Alert system is absolute rubbish. Even if it were a large scale natural disaster in which immediate action by me could have saved my life, my all too human reaction was to silence the screeching alarm (you have my attention), and then try and recall any snippet of text from the alert so I could search the internet for what the wall of text said. If I am ever in Tofino when a tsunami alert goes out, I’ll be looking on my phone searching “BC emergency alert” when the wave washes over me.
There should really be a “Silence” and “Acknowledge” two step for all Emergency Alerts. This system is objectively poorly designed, and I can’t help but suspect that it was designed by government bureaucrats and software engineers without any industrial experience. Just about any industry should have a better alarm management philosophy than this.
Alarm fatigue or alert fatigue is a fundamental concept in HMI design. I deal more in the industrial side of things, and I’ve been in the field long enough that I remember when management figured every alarm should always be #1 priority, because why else have alarms? Only thing is if an operator is getting 1000 alarms in a 12 hour shift, the truly important alarms will just be lost in the noise, and a wood chip gets stuck in the acknowledge button while they deal with alarm #382.
My #1 complaint with this amber alert though was that silencing it involved clearing it. There was a fair amount of text in the alarm body, but my phone was screaming at me, so I hit the OK button to silence it… and all the text is gone. The second alarm at 11 pm wasn’t any better, but at least I had searched the alarm. This is (I believe) a function of the phone software though, not the government body pushing the alarm. I don’t think alarm fatigue is too much of an issue, these were the first two emergency alerts I’ve gotten on my phone in a while.
Having said that, considering the time the mother and children had been missing, they could easily have made it to my corner of the province, or I might conceivably have seen the vehicle or something earlier in the week when I was in the Okanagan. I would have just appreciated it not continuously wailing at me while I desperately grab my phone. Regardless of what anyone considers about the validity of them receiving this Amber alert, at least on my phone, the Emergency Alert system is absolute rubbish. Even if it were a large scale natural disaster in which immediate action by me could have saved my life, my all too human reaction was to silence the screeching alarm (you have my attention), and then try and recall any snippet of text from the alert so I could search the internet for what the wall of text said. If I am ever in Tofino when a tsunami alert goes out, I’ll be looking on my phone searching “BC emergency alert” when the wave washes over me.
There should really be a “Silence” and “Acknowledge” two step for all Emergency Alerts. This system is objectively poorly designed, and I can’t help but suspect that it was designed by government bureaucrats and software engineers without any industrial experience. Just about any industry should have a better alarm management philosophy than this.