Since the Alarm Mode feature was added to the Alarm.com app on 6/3/2024 we have observed a significant increase in police dispatches on false alarms due to users pressing the VERIFY button during a false alarm.
The VERIFY button tells the monitoring center that you have verified the alarm is a real alarm, not a false alarm. When you press it we will dispatch the police.
Please do not press the VERIFY button unless you want the police to be sent.
We are actively investigating the issue and will provide additional information when it’s available. For more information on Alarm.com Alarm Mode see the Alarm Mode product doc.
Sounds like the data is telling you there’s a critical UX issue there where the button labels aren’t intuitive, especially under the stress of an alarm notification.
It may be clearer if you ask, “Is this a real emergency?” YES/NO. Or, “Alarm detected. Do you need emergency assistance?” YES/NO. You could also have some small helper text underneath that says, “Choosing YES will dispatch the police”.
This is accurate. We can’t directly change it, but we have provided ADC with feedback on the effects of Alarm mode, and I agree 100% the button labels are too vague.
The email notification and post here are intended as a notification to bring attention to the issue.
Agreed with the UX part on alarm.com. It’s an abysmal design and would never pass our user testing. This is very likely a developer and a front end person did the UI and didn’t think about the user journey.
Simple buttons that do what they say are standard in industrial design.
Other posters hit it right CALL POLICE or DISREGARD … Things like that. I might send that feedback to a product manager on the alarm.com side.
Also agree “verify” is too ambiguous. “Verify” could easily be interpreted as verify things are okay. Besides the wording though (where I agree with the others on the “Dispatch” wording being much better), the placement on the right is the traditional location for the “accept” action where it’s almost instinctive to click to clear/pass whatever screen one is on, and with the alarm going off and trying to silence it users are likely to click it just to shut the alarm off before realizing. A vertical selection would be a better choice in this case where users will be more likely to take the split second to read the options.
In order to avoid unnecessary false police dispatches while this issue is being investigated and worked on, we have temporarily disabled the Cancel/Verify feature in the Alarm.com app. We intend to re-enable it when the issue is resolved.
