Have you ever ignored the fire alarm ?
Yes, obviously you can't. The fire alarm is the primary warning signal in any detected occurrence of a fire. In my opinion, we should never take any chances in these emergencies.
But that has changed ever since my stay in one of the school hall of residences. Each week, on the average, the alarm sounded about 1-4 times on weekdays and about 1-3 on weekends. Till now, all of these warnings turned out to be just false alarms. Due to this circumstance, my confidence in the fire alarm warning system was greatly dampen. Nowadays, instead of rushing out of the building, my flatmates and I preferred to endure the annoying alarm and continue to stay in our rooms.
Seeing this as an opportunity for HCI blogging, i interviewed my flatmates and friends from other halls. The majority would just ignore it. This is totally insane !
This encounter made me realised that if we have to design some warning or error reporting system/programs, we do need to consider the priorties of reporting the warning/errors to the user/audience or it would be just plain annoying.
One examples would be Microsoft's Internet browser, the Internet explorer which would pop a dialog box asking whether if you want to debug the the error found ? These is definitely not required and totally useless to the user. Why would you ask the novice user to debug the errors? My suggestion would be to hide these error messages from the user but instead display it to the developers only.
As for the fire alarm problem, maybe they should just install water sprinklers that will activate in events of a detected fire in that particular room. This will definitely discourage pranksters and irresponsible hall mates. Of course, then it will be even more exciting to flood your flatmate's room !
But that has changed ever since my stay in one of the school hall of residences. Each week, on the average, the alarm sounded about 1-4 times on weekdays and about 1-3 on weekends. Till now, all of these warnings turned out to be just false alarms. Due to this circumstance, my confidence in the fire alarm warning system was greatly dampen. Nowadays, instead of rushing out of the building, my flatmates and I preferred to endure the annoying alarm and continue to stay in our rooms.
Seeing this as an opportunity for HCI blogging, i interviewed my flatmates and friends from other halls. The majority would just ignore it. This is totally insane !
This encounter made me realised that if we have to design some warning or error reporting system/programs, we do need to consider the priorties of reporting the warning/errors to the user/audience or it would be just plain annoying.
One examples would be Microsoft's Internet browser, the Internet explorer which would pop a dialog box asking whether if you want to debug the the error found ? These is definitely not required and totally useless to the user. Why would you ask the novice user to debug the errors? My suggestion would be to hide these error messages from the user but instead display it to the developers only.
As for the fire alarm problem, maybe they should just install water sprinklers that will activate in events of a detected fire in that particular room. This will definitely discourage pranksters and irresponsible hall mates. Of course, then it will be even more exciting to flood your flatmate's room !
posted by Javier at
5:03 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home