The ethical decision … good or bad?
In my first story ‘User Experience is …’ I promised that …
"over the course of a few stories, I’ll try and cover a few of the sciences we draw upon in our art as a creative community to create engaging experiences."
In my last story I talked around how User Experience is … providing certainty. This time we’re on another tangent, away from the science and art of our craft and we’re looking at the impact our art has on people and society, as we look at ethical design.
The ethical decision … good or bad?
But what is ethics and what is ethical?
the discipline dealing with what is good and bad and with moral duty and obligation.
It’s a system of moral principles that defines what is perceived as good and evil. Ethical design is, therefore, design made with the intent to do good, and unethical design is its black hat counterpart.
Let’s look a little bit more closely on what effects the ethics of design.
As with any pyramid, each layer rests on the layers below. If any layer is broken, the layers above will also collapse.
In the example of the ‘Ethical Hierarchy of Needs’:
Examples of products and services which break the pyramid are those that exploit user data, use dark patterns and generally are only out to make money, disregarding its human purpose.
Ethical design should reach further than just how we collect, store, share and manage people’s data. It should be foundational in what we are designing and building products and how we go about that.
I find myself pausing and reflecting while writing on my previous work.
A lot of the work I’ve done to date broadly either has looked at optimising conversions in e-commerce or investigating workflows and processes in order to optimise how people work in the workplace.
The teams I’ve worked in and people I’ve worked for have sometimes been so focussed on results that they have sometimes been blinded to doing the right thing, due to focussing on the business objective and trying to do what they think is a good job, in the eyes of measuring business performance.
So it’s no wonder when looking back at my work both optimising conversion and workflows have caused me to question what I am working for, who is benefiting from my work and why I am working.
Is it just to make people with money even more money and who am I actually helping from my design work?
I’ve consoled myself on occasion that I evangelise design thinking and accessibility to make sure the products I work on have good accessibility credentials to make sure they are designed for everyone and accessible to all. So I guess in part I’ve left the products that have been involved with in a better place than when I found them. However the key KPIs have always been to optimise conversation within customer e-commerce journeys.
When I’ve worked designing for the digital workplace, it gets a little more complex. You’re not only making strategic design decisions that have large scale impacts on the lives of workforces, but also the objectives of the design could be to optimise processes and workflows, which could result in the loss of jobs in that workforce.
For me the balance has always come in optimising workflows to enable the workforce to focus on important parts of their jobs by removing administration and red tape. However it is easy to focus too much on optimisation and removing human intervention by reducing and losing labour from industries, leading to redundancies.
Luckily up to this point in my career I can safely say that none of the products I have worked on although have had multi-million pound business benefits and looked at the workflow of workforces, have never resulted in shrinking the workforce.
My previous products have always looked to remove unnecessary processes or admin and made the best use of computing power in order to aid the workforce. The marriage of computing power; to do calculations and compare data to infer knowledge, with the strength of human interaction and intervention in decision making can lead to a better workflow.
This approach supports workforces in their tasks, so they are able to focus on the task in hand and not be bogged down with admin or red tape. They have focussed on what humans are good at:
However when talking to the wider design community and looking within the industries that I work, more and more designers are being asked to work on products to enable business to shrink the workforce. OK so they don’t use these words, instead the vocabulary is aimed at ‘finding synergies’, ‘improving productivity’ or ‘improving efficiencies’. So what are the ethics at play here? Shouldn’t we be using our craft to improve society, the planet and people’s lives?
I’ve personally had an internal monologue when thinking about my career. I’m never going to be able to save people, I’m not a doctor or paramedic. But I like helping people. So how can I use my craft to help people?
I’ve been fortunate to meet with some extremely talented designers who have taken on projects that have focussed on providing services to those without and those in need. After meeting with Ruby Steel who’s taken part in the BBC Big Life Fix series I started to think of how I could help better people.
So I started to write and share any ideas and knowledge I have. I’ve started working with educational organisations to support and inspire students and the teaching of design in schools and universities. And I too have been inspired to get involved in projects that are aimed at improving people’s lives.
While working on your craft and sharing this with teams to improve an organisation’s design maturity, it’s also important to incorporate ethical design practises, to ensure that the result of your efforts is ethically beneficial.
In doing so, you are part of taking the lead and showing the rest of the organisation how things can be done in a more ethical way, all of which will add to incremental change. Just as dark patterns fall under unethical design, there are ‘White Hat’ design patterns that can be utilised to ensure ethical design. So it’s important whenever you start on a project or are working on a project to take a step back and thinking about what value you are adding, for whom and to what end, to ensure your design is ethical.
So there you have it, designers should be weary of the ethics of their products, the approach they take and the outcome from using their product.
Next up I’ll look at how user story flow can be used to capture the ethics, value and certainty within user stories and how User Experience is … user story flow.
Originally written as part of the ‘User Experience is …’ series for UX Collective.