I happened to click a link that took me to the associated twitter X account for something I was interested in and was greeted by not one, not two, but four modern day web popups.

I know it’s nothing new. I’ve got a couple of firefox plugins that are usually quite good at hiding this sort of nonsense, but I guess they failed me today (or, I shudder to think, there were even more that were blocked, and this is what got through)

What’s the worst new/not-signed-in user experience you’ve encountered recently?

  • Nate CoxEnglish
    65•25 days ago

    This is so common it has a name, it’s called banner blindness.

    One of the important aspects of interface design is supposed to be not showing alerts for everything, so that when they pop up you feel compelled to pay attention.

    Not long ago a nurse killed an older woman by giving her the wrong medicine; she took accountability but called out that the software they use provides so many alerts that (probably unofficial) policy was to just click through them to get to treating the patient. One of those alerts was a callout that the wrong dosage was selected and she zoomed right by it out of habit.

    • OtterEnglish
      48•25 days ago

      Another term I seen in the context of healthcare is alert fatigue:

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue

      Alarm fatigue or alert fatigue describes how busy workers (in the case of health care, clinicians) become desensitized to safety alerts, and as a result ignore or fail to respond appropriately to such warnings.[1] Alarm fatigue occurs in many fields, including construction[2] and mining[3] (where vehicle back-up alarms sound so frequently that they often become senseless background noise), healthcare[4] (where electronic monitors tracking clinical information such as vital signs and blood glucose sound alarms so frequently, and often for such minor reasons, that they lose the urgency and attention-grabbing power which they are intended to have), and the nuclear power field. Like crying wolf, such false alarms rob the critical alarms of the importance they deserve. Alarm management and policy are critical to prevent alarm fatigue.

      • @[email protected]English
        39•25 days ago

        Automation engineer here: alarm management is a hugely important part of making a plant operable.

        It is also a project that is never done, you must always review alarms that come in and see if they are providing useful information and what the operators are supposed to do with said information.

        If the operators are not supposed to do anything with the information, then what is the point of having the alarm?