The Hawaiian Missile Alert Fiasco: How One Confusing Interface Caused Mass Hysteria

In 2018, Hawaiians received a distressing emergency text that said a ballistic missile was incoming (THIS IS NOT A DRILL). For 38 long minutes, the people of Hawaii were in a panicked frenzy—until they received a second text that said it was a false alarm. The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency meant to send out a drill, not a real alert. This one mistake was a culmination of several user interface and process failures.

How (Big, Scary) Mistakes Happen

Screenshots of HI-EMA’s interface make clear that failure was inevitable.

• Confusing Design: The design of the interface didn’t do a great job of differing test from live alerts. Each option was hyper-similar, the list was impossible to scan, and training was clearly required to understand the acronym heavy titles.
• Poor Content Choices: Someone had to write and organize those alerts, but it might as well have been written by a robot. Test and live options appeared in the same list, and it wasn’t obvious which options did what. It was an awful mess.
• Lack of Reasonable Safeguards: The user who made the mistake claimed they heard a command to send a real alert. HI-EMA begs to differ, claiming they said to send a test. Regardless of what happened, their internal processes failed them. There was nothing in place that stopped the alert from going out.

The Risk of Poor Interfaces

Luckily, everybody survived those 38 minutes of panic. But many people could have been hurt. Poor user interfaces don’t just harm the success of a business—it can have a direct impact on the safety of others. If we take any lesson from this event/fiasco, it’s to build digital products with strong processes and best practices in mind. Not just for efficient and successful businesses, but for the safety of those around us.

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