[CAP] The "User Experience" of Warnings in EAS

[David Aylward]

This is a very thoughtful article, Art.  Good for you.

User interface/engagement is really an entirely different issue than the
transport and distribution/routing issues that are the expertise of most the
parties who have been involved with CAP, EDXL etc.

You bridge those worlds, but most of us don't.  The telco guys who created
their own standard instead of CAP in the FCC WARN process certainly are not
experts on the psychology of public warning -- they are superb network
engineers.

It is not clear to me that the answer is a centralized answer versus a user
defined one.  My work with persons with disabilities has taught me that many
of my assumptions about emergency communications were too narrow.  But these
are issues that persons with real expertise in human response should be
addressing, not tech folks.




-----Original Message-----
From: cap-list-bounces at lists.incident.com on behalf of Art Botterell
Sent: Thu 5/8/2008 10:29 PM
To: cap-list at lists.incident.com
Subject: [CAP] The "User Experience" of Warnings in EAS

Apologies for cross-posting myself, but I think these questions are
going to be important to the whole CAP community, not just
broadcasters... - Art

http://www.incident.com/blog/?p=50
----------------------------------
The User Experience of Warnings in EAS
May 8th, 2008

In the runup to the May 19th EAS Showdow um Summit in Washington,
DC, most of the discussion has focused on the nuts and bolts of moving
the nations broadcast alerts across digital networks based on CAP.

But CAP only defines the information payload of a warning. It
doesnt specify how that information should be presented over HD
radio, digital TV, computers, PDAs, digital signage or any of our
various other windows into the infosphere.

This is going to become a crucial question in the very near future, I
think. As digitization drives broadcast content onto ever more
diverse platforms were going to need to give these presentation/user
interface issues as much attention as we have to transport/relay-
network design.

We may want to develop some common elements consistent visual, aural,
even tactile (e.g., portable device vibrator cadences) cues that one
might almost call branding elements to ensure that emergency alerts
have a degree of consistency across all media. Otherwise we risk
letting diversity deteriorate into confusion.

The Australians have made an interesting foray in that direction with
their Standard Emergency Warning Signal (SEWS) basically a standard
sounder that can be used consistently over broadcast, wireless,
wireline and even acoustical (siren and public address) delivery
systems. However they havent tried yet to set a comparable standard
in the visual or other domains.

Last year the FCCs cellular alerting advisory committee (the CMSAAC)
took a few first steps toward designing a consistent user experience
for a basic text-messaging interface.

But as we start talking about digital television and HD radio and the
things that lie beyond them, were going to need to bring some real
world-class user-interface expertise to bear alongside our enormous
pool of transmission engineering experience.

The Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) provides a rich standard data
payload that can be presented hopefully consistently over all media,
broadcast and otherwise. But the details of how best to present that
richer message are still to be determined and require immediate
skilled attention.
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