It’s the last day of Halloween Week on Unsung, where we’re sharing scary, spooky, and creepy stories.

On the morning of January 13, 2018, residents and tourists in Hawaii saw a frightening message on their phone screens:

In addition to being sent to 1.4 million people, a version of the alert also interrupted local TV and radio programs.

Quickly, the officials realized that something went wrong and seeked to undo what ended up being a false alarm. The siren warning system that would normally follow wasn’t activated, and various channels were used to inform people to ignore the alarming message – however, a second phone alert to follow the original one wasn’t sent out for 38 more minutes:

In the meantime, many Hawaii residents sought shelter, flooded 911 lines, and called their families to say good-bye.

What was the reason for the mistake? Industry veteran Jared Spool wrote a post explaining it in detail. We are not 100% sure, but the interface to deploy alerts likely looked like these two examples:

First, it seems like it was too easy to send a message that wasn’t a test. There was no friction for the consequence this heavy – not even a dialog box to click through, let alone something that more deliberately slows the user down, perhaps even spelling out the consequences (“you are about to send an all-caps message to 1.4 million people”), and generally feeling heavier and more cumbersome to complete than drills or local messages normally sent out.

But the true root of the problem happened earlier than that. Spool:

This wasn’t a thoughtfully designed menu, any more than any random collection of user-named objects are.

In the menu, it wasn’t just that the ordering felt completely random and the capitalization and labelling inconsistent, so neither could be used to help guide the user (for example, by putting drills above real messages, or by using all caps only for most serious, non-test commands). It was also the fact that PACOM and DRILL - PACOM were really hard to distinguish from one another.

In the end, it wasn’t just about stress and panic that engulfed the Hawaii islands for a better part of a morning hour. It was also about undermining the trust in the entire system, as any “text message that cried wolf” will see people become desensitized, or even opt out.

You might never be tasked with creating an interface to do this kind of stuff, but there are some universal lessons in here about information architecture, labelling, and friction.

At some point when I was at Medium, I fought with this kind of a thing, where three similar words to popular destinations appeared in the menu right next to each other:

And today, the general industry flattening of visual style leads to an occasional conflation like this one:

The consequences of this design doppelganging won’t be nearly as severe as in Hawaii, but if you’ve read Unsung even for just a bit, you will know what is my general point of view on this: we are better equipped to understand big events like the one in 2018, but it’s harder to see and impossible to tally up the frustrations of everyday small confusions and paper cuts adding up over the years.