I'm not sure of any standards, but I follow Don Norman's suggestions in his book The Design of Everyday Things.
1. Cut out unnecessary feedback. Like others have said, maintenance typically doesn't want to read and will disconnect audible alarms/visual cues if they're always complaining to operators
2. Have your alarms/messages/warnings/whatever contribute to the operators RCA of the issue. OkiePC made a good point of giving a little detail about where the fault is. I say take this a step further. For example....
If you have an overextend/failed to extend fault, take a look and see if there's an easy fix to prevent the operator/equipment from causing this error. Can you place a limit on an input to prevent this error? If not, point the op to where the error is and earn bonus points for telling them how to fix it or what caused it.
If you can't design a prevention of the alarm into the system, then at least make the alarm somewhat intelligent. A concise description and fix that is like a skirt, "long enough to cover the essentials, but short enough to maintain interest." Source: PLCTalk.net user
Here's a decent summary of feedback, with overuse of alarms being touched on page 12/13.
http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/Norman-overautomation.pdf