Designing for tomorrow; how I’m planning on taking ethical responsibility throughout my design career

My plan for taking ethical responsibility throughout my design career

In recent years, the knowledge around how tech and design increasingly exploit users using dark patterns has boomed. It’s no longer a secret of big tech companies. The Netflix documentaries The Social Dilemma(2020) explores the dangerous human impact of social networking and The Great Hack(2019) explores how Cambridge Analytica came to symbolise the dark side of social media in the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Ethics comes up when things go down. Image from https://www.designethically.com/presentation

In a world where many tech companies have learned to capitalise on human instincts, behaviour and psychology, it’s important that designers start seeing their role in helping to tackle the problem at the root. It starts with the decisions designers and product managers make. It starts with looking beyond incentives such as revenue, engagements, adopted users and promotions. It starts by bringing up ethics earlier in the process of creating digital products and services.

How might we bring ethics up earlier?

Becoming an ethically responsible designer

Let’s first get things straight. What do I mean when I say ethical responsibility? What are ethics and what do I mean when I’m referring to ethics in the context of User Experience? These are all questions that have been playing in my mind for the past few weeks.

Ethics is the philosophy of what is the right, or good thing to do.

User experience is a famously messy thing to describe, to me it means practicing a set of methods, principles and techniques for validating problems, researching what users want, need and desire and to design products and services for them which helps them achieve a goal.

This led me to reflect even more on the difference between values, principles and ethics and my conclusion is as follows…

Values
They’re qualities or standards that we think are ideal.
Our values drive our behaviour.

Principles
They’re rules to follow, based on our values.
These rules are recipes for success.

Ethics
They’re values in action.
What we believe is the right thing to do, based on our values and principles, drive the decisions we make.

“ethics is not a checklist or an impact assessment, it’s the decisions we make out of the back of our values and principles. It’s what we believe is the right thing to do, given the knowledge that we have. Ethics is about thinking about the bigger picture whenever tradeoffs need to be considered” VIRT-EU project

A summary of my view on values versus principles versus ethics

How I plan to do to address the responsibilities of UX design to push for inclusivity, autonomy and security

1. Educating myself and others to learn and unlearn. Ethics is what we believe is the right thing to do given the knowledge that we have. It’s my responsibility to come out of my privileged bubble, learn more and unlearn.

I’ve created my own education library in Figma with Inclusive Design education for myself and others

2. Shedding light on dark patterns. Dark Patterns are tricks used in products and services that make users do things they didn’t mean to, e.g. buying or signing up for something. The website darkpatterns.org exists to raise public awareness of deceptive digital practices and currently have 12 types of dark patterns explained. Confirmshaming is ‘the act of guilting the user into opting into something. It’s when the option to decline is worded in such a way as to shame the user into compliance.’ e.g. having to click “No I don’t like healthy food” as the only way to opt-out of a food subscription service. Forced Continuity is ‘when you silently start getting charged without any warning or a service is making it difficult to cancel the membership’ e.g. having to search for the cancel subscription link, only to find out you have to contact the support team via email who will ask questions on why you made a decision to cancel.

3. Reflecting on my North Star values. In order to make ethical decisions, I need to know my own values. My values are Clarity, Empathy, Collaboration and these ideals guide my approach to problem-solving. Here’s what they mean to me in practice...

Clarity
• be as clear and transparent as possible
• use terminology that the broadest range of users would understand e.g use the word ‘get’ instead of ‘obtain’
• make it easy for users to achieve their goal

Empathy
• you are not the user
• approach business problems with empathy
• speak to humans to understand what they need, want and desire

Collaboration
• the best ideas come from a collaborative approach
• collaborate with different disciplines and a diverse set of users throughout the project lifecycle

You can’t just bring your designer self to work and leave your own values at home.

These ideals guide my approach to problem-solving.

4. Add a few new steps to my design process. I’ve been inspired by the framework at https://www.designethically.com to add crucial steps to the Design Thinking process.

• evaluating intent, before we build anything — let’s evaluate our intent. Is our focus on individuals and society first or companies, government and brands first?
• forecast and assess — Taking a look at the ideas we’ve generated as a team and assess any ethical weak spots or any potential ways that your product can be exploited in unethical ways. Spotify has created an Ethical assessment sheet for this.
• auditing — what we designed and built looking at it from a lens of inclusive design in a collaborative manner. See point 7 for how I see this happening.

5. Digging deeper into ethics. I’ve learned about using ethical theories as a decision-making framework. They’re perspectives that we can try on. We use them to find answers to difficult questions and dilemmas (sometimes without even knowing it).

• utilitarian theory. We should try to maximise wellbeing and happiness is what matters most. Let’s do whatever will work best in the long run. The greatest good for the greatest number.
• consequentialism theory. The consequences are the only things that ultimately matter. Our ultimate goal is to make things go as well as possible, that what is best or right is whatever makes the world best in the future.
• care ethics theory. We can make good choices and achieve a good way of living together if we deepen our care towards one another. Care ethics overlaps often with feminist and ecological theories.
• virtue theory. Which action leads me to act as the sort of person I should be? We can achieve a good life by cultivating specific moral traits and capacities.

What is the difference between Virtue and Values? 🤔 The main difference between value and virtue is that values are qualities or standards that drive our behaviour, virtues are qualities that are universally considered to be good and desirable.

6. Looking at product and services with different lenses. Whenever we work on a new product or service.

• Lens 1: zoom in. Get to know the product and how it works. What exactly is this product or service? Who will use it?
• Lens 2: north stars. What is important to you in this product? What good is it actually doing? What is it working towards?
• Lens 3: time. What could happen as it is used over time?
• Lens 4: scale. What if it were wildly successful?
• Lens 5: futures. What else might be happening in the future?
• Lens 6: stories. Focus on finding and hearing the unheard stories.

7. Run Inclusive Design workshops. I’m currently working in a Service Design team and for us, it’s important to design for all users. We ask other teams to run accessibility audits on our work, we work with accessibility personas and test our work with users who have accessibility needs (e.g. users with mild to severe motor, visual, emotional or auditory impairments).

We specify that we’re looking for a diverse group of participants in our recruitment briefs (different sex, age, digital savviness, language skills, culture, background etc). But not all teams around the world have budgets or other teams to hand that can run independent accessibility audits, and this is why the design community needs to collaborate and help each other out. The dream would be if teams around the world could swap products and services and carry out Inclusive Design audits for each other. With all of my new knowledge and thoughts throughout the 2-week Hyper Island Ethics in UX course I’ve just taken part in, I’ve designed an Inclusive Design workshop that I’m going to test with my team, iterate and then encourage other teams to use.

Links

Inclusive Design education and auditing workshop

References and resources

The Virtue research project theories and lenses www.virteuproject.eu

The Design Ethically process framework https://www.designethically.com

Monzo Tone of voice | Inclusive language inspired my North Star value clarity https://monzo.com/tone-of-voice/

Spotify ethics assessment template https://spotify.design/article/investigating-consequences-with-our-ethics-assessment

Accessibility posters UK Government https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/02/dos-and-donts-on-designing-for-accessibility/

Spotify blog on incentives for big tech companies https://spotify.design/article/designing-for-tomorrow-a-discussion-on-ethical-design