I attended an event titled, “How Bad UX Made Things Worse – CrowdStrike Outage Crash Computers Worldwide” on meet-up by the organization Orange County User Experience, OCUX, which was hosted by Rhett Kuseski who is a IT systems administrator at IRWD, Irvine Ranch Water District. OCUX are professionals as well as students from Orange County, CA, that have discussions about the industry. He went over some of his UX jobs and opportunities of working with nonprofits; volunteer opportunities in web, content, and graphic design, branding, flier and publication design, charity donation coordinator, community service, membership, advocacy, meet organizer, and zoom admin. He briefly went over the usability criteria of visibility of system status, match between system and the real world, user control and freedom, error prevention, recognition rather than recall, flexibility and efficiency of use, aesthetic and minimalist design, and help users recognize, diagnose and recover from errors. He also included three he came up with which were general usability, affordances and signifiers, and conceptual model.
CrowdStrike is a cloud-base service that manages security. They pushed an update without going through the process of sending it to a small patch before going live. Also he discussed how Windows has a system to detect malware or suspicious files which did not work in this case. Blue screens usually signify that the machine is corrupted but in this case windows have changed the color of the blue screen of death to a different blue so they identified it was not that. On the screen it displayed what the problem was. Many people were affected and their system was affected in IRWD that he and his team worked to fix. Crowdstrike did a poor customer service by not notifying their users of what was going on. The only way to see the information about the error was to login to crowdstrike. They violated error prevention and error correction in UX. Error prevention because there should be a display window on the screen when entering safe mode as a step to fix the problem but he was not sure if the computer was in safe mode so they had to do it multiple times. Error correction as windows should quarantined the update and rebooted itself to fix the issue. Also depending on the update the machine was on there were different ways to solve the same problem and mentioned this was a DELL issue. They have network monitoring in the system and that will let you know if something is not working but failed to notify them on time. I learned more about how UX affects the way to solve a problem and it should be the same so if any issues occur there should be an efficient way to fix it. As he mentioned there were more steps in some cases to get to the solution based on the update the system was on. For my next meeting I would like to get portfolio tips to see how I could implement them in my own portfolio.