“Seek immediate shelter” — Why investing in UX is important
By now everyone’s heard about the Kafkaesque text message received on every cell phone in Hawaii on January 13 stating “BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.” My wife’s dad called us when he received it… believing (but not totally sure) that he might be saying goodbye to his daughter and grandchildren forever. Everything about it felt like a mistake… but with all of the political rhetoric over the past year, who knows?
There’s been and will continue to be a lot of coverage about why and how this could happen — and how it could remain uncorrected while an entire state panicked for 38 minutes — but there is one detail that’s been mentioned that could really use some focus to prevent things like this in the future. Bad user interface design.
“It’s a regular PC interface. This person probably had a mouse and a dropdown menu of the kind of alert messages you can send,” Retired Admiral David Simpson, former chief of the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau told Wired.
Come again? Someone designed a drop-down menu where you can choose “test missile alert” or “missile alert”? And there was no pop-up window that said ‘Are you SURE you want to send a missile alert to every person in Hawaii? This is not a drill?’?… And there was no easy way to send a message 30 seconds later saying it was all a mistake and to please resume your life?
In a world where I can order a pizza for delivery and the interface makes absolutely sure that my toppings are correct before my credit card is charged this is inexplicable. Unless you work in B2B or government contracting.
According to McKinsey the average B2B company lags far behind average B2C companies on overall digital capabilities (what they term a company’s Digital Quotient) despite evidence that investing in digital leadership is directly correlated with higher growth in revenues, operating profit and return to shareholders. While this includes back-end digital capabilities as well as a culture of digital adaptation, user experiences designed around user journeys play a key part of this quotient.
For too long B2B and government user interface design has been something considered not worth investing in simply because the person who purchases enterprise software in a large organization is never the person using it. So enterprise software companies have focused their sales, marketing and user experience expertise on creating a seamless procurement process while the on-the-ground personnel using the end product gets an engineer-designed minimum-viable-product that usually requires extensive training (another upsell) to learn how to use. But what if that enterprise software is a critical infrastructure, communications or emergency response tool? Or even what if that enterprise software isn’t life-or-death to everyone, but is life-or-death to your company? When the end user’s actual experience of the product is treated as unimportant there are bound to be negative consequences — and with enterprise software small errors can have big repercussions.
Fortunately there is a slow awakening to the idea that user journey-mapping and design-thinking style deep dives into who customers are and what motivates them applies to B2B and government clients as well as consumers. But even this movement has mostly created changes in how marketers and sales teams set up CRM systems, sales collateral and content campaigns. Examples like what just happened in Hawaii demonstrate why we shouldn’t stop B2B user journeys and user experience design at the moment we’ve made the sell… Someday, down the line, that bad user interface design can have major consequences for the client as well as the company that sold them a poorly executed product.