What does ‘12 FIRE Smoke Family Room’ mean, Anyway?

When the designer can’t it figure something is seriously wrong.
Published on Medium May 5, 2020

Recently, my family and I went to our friend’s vacation house in the Catskill Mountains, a few hours north of our home in New York City. Our friends weren’t there, but they let us use it for a long weekend. They are wonderfully generous and we love them a lot. It was our first morning, the sun was peeking over the mountains and things were lining up to be a warm sunny day filled with hiking, fun and relaxation. There was only one problem. The security system was going off like mad and I had no idea how to stop it.

We were making pancakes, oatmeal pancakes, a hearty start for an outdoors day. The coffee had finished brewing. We were slicing fresh berries we had picked up at the farmer’s market back home. Everything was good to go. When the first spoonful of batter hit the hot griddle, a small cloud of steam and smoke filled the room and triggered the smoke alarm. All of a sudden, our peaceful morning was shattered by 90 decibels of shrieking madness.

Instinctually, I went to the smoke alarm trying to pull the batteries out — that’s what you do with standard smoke detectors. But our friends have a professionally installed security system and the smoke detectors are designed to prevent anyone from pulling the batteries out. It doesn’t have any buttons on it either, so there’s seemingly nothing to do. Next step? Open the windows and turn on the fan. Once the air cleared the detector siren stopped ringing. Yay! That’s over!

But wait, there’s more. Now we hear a beeping noise coming from a closet where I found a security panel. Feeling a little unsettled and more annoyed, I saw an ‘Off’ button and pressed it hoping it could be so easy. When nothing happened — no change to the screen, no blinking light, no voice prompt, no feedback whatsoever — I felt stuck. I started pressing other buttons in hopes something would stop the beeping.

Thankfully, our friend got a notification on his phone and called. He figured false alarm and was more worried the monitoring company would actually send the fire department. He said, “press the numbers 9637 and then off or stay or something”. He wasn’t actually sure. I did it, but nothing happened. I did it again, nothing. I tried different combinations over and over and over. Still nothing. “Sorry, still beeping.” “Ok, I need to call the monitoring company so they don’t actually send the fire department. That’s what I’m really afraid of.” “Ok,” I say, “I’ll keep trying.”

This entire time the panel was beeping and the screen displaying “12 FIRE Smoke Family Room.” Pressing any buttons in any order did nothing. And then, the beeping stopped all by itself. The false alarm was over. Somehow the system knew? Maybe my friend’s call to the monitoring company did it? No idea. Yet, the screen still showed ’12 FIRE Smoke Family Room.’ Was there still a fire alarm going on?

What happened? No idea but I was glad it stopped beeping. ‘How crazy is this system anyway? Makes no sense. Total nut ball. Whatever, let’s get back to breakfast.’

Here’s the kicker. I’m a User Experience (UX) designer, and not just a UX designer but (until recently) a security-system UX designer for the company that manufactured this exact security system. I know how these things work, how they’re built, and even I couldn’t navigate the user interface and stop what is the most common type of alarm — a false alarm.

My friend’s system was first manufactured and released about a decade ago, well before I joined the company, but it still delivers a lot of revenue. It makes a lot of security dealers happy. It pays the bills. Many people are proud of it. And they should be, it’s delivered a lot of value to the company and their primary customers — professional security dealers. But, in spite of all this success, it does little for end users like me, my friend and other “normal” humans.

Unfortunately, most security systems are like this. They are built to be distributed, sold and installed. They are shipped around the country with a promise to keep homes and families safe and protected from danger. They represent a multi-billion dollar industry with strong growth potential. But, despite all this, they make little effort to be easy to understand, easy to use, or to solve industry-wide problems like false alarms.

Why did it give me such trouble?

This is a classic example of a device and a user experience that cares more about the expert installer than the everyday end user. It cares more about the product’s Bill of Material (BOM) cost than usability. It cares more about technology function and performance than human performance and experience. It cares more about revenue and margin from the distribution channel than positive consumer sentiment and brand building. It cares more about ease, speed and cost of production than ease, speed and cost of operation.

Let’s catalog its sins:

• There are 16 buttons. Each button has 2 labels — one on the button, another just below. It’s unclear what pressing any one button will do. If pressing the button triggers the function labeled on the button, then how do you trigger the function printed below the button? And this assumes you understand what the labels mean. What does ‘Bypass’ bypass anyway?

• The display shows a status message but provides no instruction or guidance for what to do. The ’12 FIRE Smoke Family Room’ message is cryptic. The word ‘Smoke’ relates to the smoke detector going off. That’s pretty clear. ‘Family Room’ is presumably the specific smoke detector. There are multiple in the house after all. The meaning of ’12’ is unclear. Are there 12 fire smokes? ‘FIRE’ is redundant. Where there’s smoke there’s fire, right? And why is it the only one screaming in ALL CAPS?

• Pressing a button — any button — generates no user feedback or instruction. The software makes no effort to help the user in any way. It relies on the user knowing which buttons to press in which order to complete whichever operation they’re trying to complete. All the instructions can presumably be found in a printed user manual, somewhere on the web, or in the installer’s brain. None of these are here at the moment it matters most.

• There are 2 LED lights with one label each. The one labeled ‘Ready’ is on, the other labeled ‘Armed’ is not. Why is ‘Ready’ on? What is it ready for? What is the difference between being Armed and Ready? Is this related to the ’12 FIRE Smoke Family Room’ status message?

Could the display show some feedback and guide the user through canceling the alarm? Yes it could but that would require code to be written and tested, adding time to the production schedule.

Could it have another button or two to make the UI a bit more clear? Yes it could but that would add more buttons, more circuitry and require more code to handle them. All this adding time to the schedule, and cost to the product, thus reducing profit margins.

Could it have a different display that would give more room for guiding the user and simplifying operation? Yes, but that would require different circuitry and more code, adding even more time and cost.

Could it be built to avoid or streamline common use cases like false alarms? Yes, but that might restrict the installer’s flexibility to configure the system in different ways, require even more code, and might even pose a challenge to the technical underpinnings of the whole system, adding more cost and time to the schedule and challenging the team to think in new ways.

Could the whole experience be rethought, identifying opportunities to save money for dealers, improve the end-user experience, and protect against new competitors entering the space? Yes, but there’s no time for that per the defined cost and schedule goals, and overall business priorities. The schedule has to be hit, the budget kept. To do this means building on top of the prior model, reusing existing code and electronics, and avoiding as much change and uncertainty as possible. All this will save time and money. A rethink is a nice idea, solving these big problems would be good, but we have goals to hit. These big ideas will have to wait until after this product ships. Ambition, innovation, invention deferred.

This is what ’12 FIRE Smoke Family Room’ is really trying to say.

The truly sad thing is this results in a huge waste of time, money and opportunity — for a lot of people.

My false alarm required a lot of human time and the use of multiple systems to resolve. The alarm went off and sent a signal through the network to the monitoring company that handles alarms for the dealer who installed it. The alarm goes into the queue for the agents at the monitoring call center. My friend gets a notification through the security app on his phone. He calls me to confirm it’s burnt pancake and not burnt vacation home. He calls and speaks to the monitoring agent, relaying the pancake-not-home message. The agent cancels the alarm, registers the event and moves on to the next, presumably false, alarm in the queue. Meanwhile, I’m randomly pressing buttons to no effect with no idea what’s happening.

Three people spending a minute or five using mobile apps, phone calls, and ineffectual button-pressing to resolve a false alarm may not seem like much. But when you recognize that about 20% of all U.S. households have a professionally-monitored security system and that about 95% of alarms are false, handling them represents a significant amount of human time and network usage. And for what? Letting a monitoring center call agent know the griddle was a bit too hot? In the end, it all adds up to a lot of wasted time, energy and cost. Isn’t there some broader value in reducing this waste?

Worse, only about 25% of households even have a security system. The other 75% either can’t afford the monthly service fee, or they don’t see the value in paying for something they don’t understand how to use and that often causes more pain than pleasure. Or, in some cases, they feel these systems look cheap and obsolete, and don’t hold up well sharing wall space with the latest 50-inch 4K TV, or the nearby smart speaker or smart display.

Worse still, the entire experience served to reinforce the ‘pain in my ass’ attitude my friend has toward his security system and the monthly fee he pays to the local dealer. He hasn’t canceled his security service, not yet anyway. But these experiences don’t help his cost-benefit equation. Maybe he’ll finally get around to installing those Arlo Wi-Fi video cameras and reattaching the regular smoke detectors the dealer took down when he got the system. Those seem pretty cool and easy. Or maybe he’ll get a different system, one with a lower monthly fee he can install himself, plenty of those out there. In the end, what keeps him paying the dealer’s fee is knowing the fire department is more likely to show up more quickly if the monitoring company gets the alarm signal and relays it than if he did it all himself. So he keeps paying the fee that allows the dealer and monitoring company to cover the cost of these wasted moments and supports the manufacture of these hard-to-use and unremarkable devices.

But think of this, if the panel had a ‘false alarm’ button, or some similarly simple solution, everything could have been streamlined and the waste of handling false alarms could be massively reduced. I hear the beeping, go to the panel, press the ‘false alarm’ button, input a special code or password (necessary for security confirmation), and done. One button press and it’s all over.

I could do this on the panel or my friend could do it in his app — or both. Better yet, put a false alarm button on the smoke detector itself. When it goes off you could stop it right there, at the source. The alarm is automatically canceled. My friend doesn’t have to call the agent. The monitoring agent doesn’t have to take a call or do anything. My friend could and probably would call me. He might have to give me the special code. Or maybe he wrote it on a Post-It next to the panel! But now we can joke about burnt pancakes and reflect on how great his security system is. It’s so easy and brings so much peace of mind. Maybe I should get one? But I’ll make sure to put the smoke detector a little farther away from the stove this time.

Tilting at windmills

I spent six years learning the ins and outs of the professionally-monitored residential security business, while working on next-generation hardware and software security products. I worked with smart and thoughtful people, inside my company and across the industry. Our UX design team worked hard to improve the user experience for homeowners, security dealers, and installers. We tried to make products easier to understand, simpler to install, operate and use. We tried to make them better looking. We tried to reduce false alarms and make it easier to resolve them. We even tried a few somewhat radical ideas. I like to think we made a difference.

But, in the end, you can only change so much. In any business, inertia and risk-aversion can easily take over. Short-term priorities override long-term vision and transformative thinking. Production cost, development schedules, and a little bit more profit margin takes priority. Business managers won’t (or aren’t allowed to) take a risk. They have to hit their revenue and profit numbers, so the company can hit its numbers. The incentive is to keep it all going from quarter to quarter and year to year, with little long-term planning or ambition. And it usually does keep going, until it doesn’t. Until a startup comes in, changes the game, and forces the issue. Or until a visionary leader takes a leap, questions the fundamentals, and inspires a better product and experience. Or until things collapse under the weight of their own inertia.

Post Script — How bad does it have to get?

As it turns out, the industry-wide false alarm problem is being addressed but through regulation and new technology — video alarm verification. In short, put a video camera in the house, show it’s a real emergency and not a false alarm, and then, only then, will the police or fire department actually respond. The problem of false alarms got so bad some cities and municipalities started ignoring security alarms. Think of it. You buy a security alarm so the police or fire department will come when there’s an emergency. That’s the whole point. But, the police won’t come because they believe alarms are false. And they’re right. Instead they demand proof it’s a real alarm before they pay attention. This calls into question the entire value proposition of a security system. The problem had to get that bad. And even then it was addressed by adding a layer of regulation and technology, not by resolving the fundamental issues underlying and causing false alarms. But, the story doesn’t end there. The ‘verified response’ approach has its own problems and is being challenged in many cities across the country.

At this point, you might be wondering — what is the top cause of false alarms? It’s “User Error”. Yup. All this because the majority of end users have trouble understanding how their systems work and how to operate them correctly. Huh. Maybe if the systems were designed to be easier to use the problem wouldn’t be so bad in the first place. I guess sometimes the fundamentals are just too hard to deal with.