Wednesday, August 14, 2013

AMBER Alert Usability

Craig Hockenberry:

Unlike all other notifications on my iPhone, I couldn’t interact with the alert. There was no way to slide the icon for more information or tap on it in the Notification Center to get additional information. […] But I was also seeing a lot of people on Twitter whose response to the confusion was to ask how to turn the damn thing off. And since AMBER Alerts aren’t affected by the “Do Not Disturb” settings, a lot of people went to Settings > Notification Center so they wouldn’t get woken again in the future.

Update (2013-08-29): Lex Friedman:

The biggest risk is that iPhone owners (and owners of other smartphones with WEA support) will disable Amber Alerts because of the annoyance factor. And yes, you can disable the alerts if you don’t want to see (and hear) them: Go to the Settings app, choose Notifications, and scroll all the way down.

I just turned it off after being woken up at 3 AM by an Amber Alert for a flood warning that didn’t actually affect my area. It was apparently not even significant enough to show up in my weather app.

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