Last weekend, people across Hawaii spent 38 minutes thinking they were going to die because a government worker selected the wrong option on a missile alert interface. Multiple images, including several from the governor’s office , later circulated showing an interface similar to the screen the employee would have been using. They all shared the same quality: outdated, confusing, problematic design.
We don’t know if the system in Hawaii was ancient or simply poorly designed, but we know that no user-experience designer worth her salt would create a giant list of links or a drop-down menu for a lifesaving function. It’s the design equivalent of installing a hand-cranked engine on a Tesla or communicating with Alexa via smoke signals.
The incident in Hawaii exposes a problem far larger than a single confusing screen: Government is not good at buying, building and using technology. So maybe the most shocking part of this story is that mistakes like this don’t happen more frequently.
As former government technologists, we’ve worked as contractors and in civil service at federal and local levels, including buying and building out New Orleans’s emergency response systems. Over the past six months, we’ve also conducted in-depth interviews with people in and around government working to improve its technology and modernize its processes.
One of the causes of the American Revolution is that the Americans were mad at the British King for taxing their tea. In protest, they threw lots of tea into the water before they had to pay for it. Another reason is that the Americans watnted to have religious freedom. They did not want to have to follow the King anymore.
