TL;DR
When several player set alerts (programmable speakers) are active, cycle through the locations when clicking on the alert icon.What ?
Players can set a programmable speaker to show an alert icon if a condition is met. The alert icon is shown next to the other alert icons at the bottom of the screen. When clicking the icon, the map opens and centers on the location of the alert. If several of these alerts are active, too only one alert icon is shown. Hovering over it, will show the alert texts of all the alerts. Though, clicking the icon only centers on one of the alerts. The other alert locations can not be focused on quickly by clicking the icon.I suggest to either show one icon per alert or to make the map cycle through the alert locations when clicking the icon.
Why ?
The programmable speakers alarms stand out in the regard, that they are not on par with factorio's native alarms. They do not cycle through the alert locations when clicking the icon - all the other alarms do and the icons on the map are very very small and hard to spot - all the native alarm icons are much larger and additionally have icon colors which are made to draw attention. These facts combined with the assumption or experience, that player set alarms stand for a condition, the player wants to be notified about specifically (eg. some place running out of defense resources is much more importan than being able to cycle through every single wall piece that has been destroyed somewhere), makes me feel the UI is lacking something important. If anything, those alarms should stand out more and be easier to find, than the native alarms.When playing on a megabase that has a lot of programmable speakers set to notify the player of something, it can be quite hard to find the location of the alert, if it can not be focused on by clicking the alert icon and if the player did not describe it in the alert text in wise foresight (eg "Iron mine 27 is empty."). The flashing alert icons on the map are very small and hard to spot. The only solution to this problem is to search all the possible locations and that can take some time on a megabase map.
To me it just feels like a missing piece to the UI-experience. This part is not scaling and behind. I think it should be at least on par with the native alarms. For a better UIX (and also to be in line with Factorio's automation doctrine by scaling with the size of the factory).
Example of the problem with Factorio's current behavior:
I have an outpost bp and a lot of outposts built. The alerts are all the same on all the outposts. Changing the alert texts for the speakers in each outpost by hand after it was built would be very time consuming. Also the player character has to go to that location to change the properties of a speaker. And that is even more time consuming if they were built by bots far away. If an alert is activated, is one of several, but is more important than the one the map will focus on, I have to search for the flashing alert icon on the map for some time or check all the possible locations, if they are the location where the condition was met.
