Gotcha! False Alarms ; Automated systems have a tendency to fill the world with alerts: fire alarms, low-inventory warnings, squawking medical devices in a hospital, and collision alarms in planes or, increasingly, automobiles.

Automated systems have a tendency to fill the world with alerts: fire alarms, low-inventory warnings, squawking medical devices in a hospital, and collision alarms in planes or, increasingly, automobiles. Whether you're designing the alarm-generating software or merely deciding which alarms to turn on in a packaged product, the challenge is finding the right balance between too many alarms and too few. Problem: Too many false alarms train users to ignore valid warnings. Resolution: You must combat a "better safe than sorry" attitude among systems engineers, says James P. Bliss, a professor at Old Dominion University who has studied this "Boy Who Cried Wolf" problem extensively in the …