A policy to be proud of
I've been thinking about 'ethics' quite a lot recently, not least because I work for a company that has a long-standing and deep-rooted commitment to ethical principles. These principles are enshrined in our Ethical Policy, which is created by first asking our customers to tell us about the things that matter to them, then setting out what we are and will be doing to address the points raised.
The latest iteration of the Ethical Policy outlines the company's stance and committed actions across three key pillars: planet, people, and community. It sets out our commitment to tackling the climate crisis, campaigning for change in the areas that matter most to our customers (including homelessness, domestic abuse, and human rights), and creating a fairer, more co-operative society for both local and global communities.
Working for an organisation that actively champions and promotes ethical values like these makes me extremely proud, as these kinds of attitudes and approaches align with my own personal values and intrinsic motivations – that is, helping people using empathy and a kind, human-centred approach to problem-solving. But it was only through relatively recent reflection that I realised how much our Ethical Policy has in common with some of the key tenets of UX design.
Focus on user needs
Perhaps most crucially, our Ethical Policy is shaped by a deep and deliberate understanding of our users' wants and needs. As De Voil writes, "the most important factor in designing usable systems is understanding users and their needs" (2020: 25). Norman concurs: "Human-centred design [...] means starting with a good understanding of people and the needs that the design is intended to meet" (2013: 9).
This emphasis on understanding user needs mirrors the approach taken to the design of our Ethical Policy. We speak to our customers, ask them about their concerns, and seek to understand what it is that we can do to help address them. We give all our customers the opportunity to shape the policy, with over 370,000 responses feeding into the latest iteration (published in June 2022). We shape the Policy commitments around this user feedback, regularly reappraising customers' views to develop it as needed – thus iterating as feedback and new information come to light. Our Ethical Policy, then, is fundamentally human-centred – in design and content, form and function.
This realisation at once reinforced the sense of pride I feel in working for an organisation that quite literally puts its customers at the heart of what it does, and also reinforced my faith in the fundamental nature of people to want to do good – for the planet, for their local communities, and for the people around the world who deserve equal opportunities when it comes to human rights.
I wanted to explore the connection between ethics and UX design further, and to consider how I feel about the role ethics has to play in my own practice on both a professional and personal level.
With great power comes great (UX) responsibility
Narayanan and Vallor claim that "software helps shape, not just reflect, our societal values" (2014: 23). In a very real sense, the things we design and create can nudge people towards certain behaviours and shape the way they view and interact with the world.
As a "benign but illustrative example" (ibid: 24) of the potentially powerful influence of software development – and by extension, design – on human behaviour, they cite the 'Google doodle' game created in honour of late guitarist Les Paul. Estimates show that approximately 5.3 million hours were spent by people playing this game, which is the equivalent of around 8 adult human lifetimes.
Thought of through the lens of this example, it can be said that anyone designing any product, service, or system that people interact with (that is, the vast majority, if not all, products, services, and systems in existence) carries a great deal of responsibility for how the user engages with the experience.
This is precisely the argument Marsh puts forward in his book People Shaped: Tales and Tricks of a Human Centred Designer: "Human centred [sic] design is for people that think that designing and making stuff is a craft that comes with great responsibility" (2017: 37).
Indeed, Marsh goes further to suggest that "much of what goes on within the design and innovation world [is] irresponsible [emphasis my own]" (ibid: 18). Hertz gives a more concrete example of this when she describes the relationship many of us have with technology, particularly our mobile phones: "Today, like a pair of glasses on our face whose presence we no longer notice, our phones have effectively become a part of us [...] this is no ‘happy accident’. The big corporate beasts of our digital age have worked very hard to ensure this is so" (2020: 98).
The impact of our behaviour on our interpersonal relationships – and, crucially, our capacity for empathy, compassion, understanding, and connection – is further driven home by the metaphor of the phone as "our mistress and our lover. Nowadays we cheat on those around us in plain sight and somehow we have all come to accept the infidelity. We are present and yet we are not, together and yet alone" (ibid: 101).
The areas for which designers might (should?) be thought of as responsible are thus vast and wide-ranging – from nudging user behaviour and attitudes in certain (perhaps unethical or undesirable) directions and the subsequent impact on both the self and wider society, to creating designs that don't meet user needs and are therefore a waste of valuable resources (including time, money, knowledge, and physical and technological output that can have a detrimental impact on the environment).
Going back to the Google doodle example above, Narayanan and Vallor pose a series of compelling questions: "Did the doodle make a positive contribution to the world? Do engineers at Google have an obligation to consider this question before releasing the feature? What principle(s) should they use to determine their answer about the benefits and/or harms of their work?" (2014: 24).
The first point on the game's contribution to the world struck me in particular. In all my research and exploration of the field of UX so far, I've been drawn to the consistent and unrelenting emphasis on the importance of the user and their needs. I hadn't truly considered, though, the necessity of thinking about whether the products and services we design ultimately have a broader positive impact on the world at large, perhaps beyond the original context for which they were created. Nor had I really considered whether the responsibility for this consideration explicitly lies with the designer themselves.
Sticking with the Google doodle example – what was the Les Paul game trying to achieve? Was it meeting a user need? Was the impact of playing the game positive or negative – or indeed, neutral – for users, and for the world at large? What if any impact did the makers set out to achieve?
A quick look at the doodle itself might go some way to answering these questions. The description of the game includes some brief history on Les Paul himself, instructions for how to play the game, and some information on how the game was made from a technical standpoint. This type of content could be seen as instructional or educational – something users can learn from and, arguably, positively benefit from as a creative outlet for fun and experimentation. A map shows the extensive reach of the doodle, with users in the US alone creating 40 million songs using the game.
Personally, I see this as a good, if not prime, example of the power of collaborative creativity. In fact, I'm struggling to see how this can be anything but a "positive contribution to the world". If Narayanan and Vallor are arguing that the '8 lifetimes' spent playing the game could have been put to better use, I'd counter that there are countless other activities that would likely add up to just as many (or more) lifetimes that could be deemed as having a less positive – or indeed, actively negative – impact on the world (smoking, to name just one example).
This being said, what constitutes 'better use', 'a positive impact on the world', and, indeed, 'ethical responsibility' are highly subjective concepts. Depending on who you ask, then, you might get very different responses to the question of whether designers have an ethical responsibility to ensure that the things we create positively impact the world at large.
On a personal level, I do feel that I have a responsibility to make sure my designs are neither harmful nor misleading, intentionally or otherwise. In my role as a UX Content Designer, for example, I try to actively think about the impact of my linguistic choices on my reader. I'm very conscious of the fact that the words I use directly impact my readers' thought processes, feelings, and actions.
As Kane summarises: "The language used in interfaces influences the decisions that our users will make. Manipulative copy nudges users towards making choices that are against their best interests" (2019). Language is thus a powerful element of the 'choice architecture' of a user's experience: "both the main content of a website and in the interface itself establishes [sic] context and crafts the choices offered" (ibid).
As a Content Designer and someone who cares deeply about the impact of my actions on other people, I feel that I have an ethical duty, alongside a legal one, to present my readers with all the information they need to do what they need to do in a comprehensive yet clear, useful, usable manner.
As for whether everything I design has to have a positive impact on the world – my current feelings are yes, but with the caveat that this means different things for different people. If the impact of a Google doodle game is a few minutes of relaxation and joy for hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of people, or if the impact of a well-crafted error message is that a handful of users are spared the time, effort, and frustration of trying to work out what went wrong – I'd call that positive.
Others may see things differently – but perhaps that's why, as Narayanan and Vallor suggest, ethics should be incorporated within the curricula of software development courses: "In many real-life cases there is no single right answer, only a range of more or less ethically informed and wise responses. What matters is that students get comfortable exercising ethical discernment in a professional context alongside their peers" (2014: 25). It's the thought processes, the consideration, and the conversations that matter most.
Clearly, ethics in UX is a complex, multifaceted subject. I think I have a tendency towards optimism when it comes to the things I'm passionate about, which perhaps means that I don't always see the potential negatives. But I do feel proud that I get to help shape people's experiences for the better through the work I do. In the 'Praise' section of Strategic Writing for UX by Torrey Podmajersky (2017), UX content strategist Jennifer Hofer writes that the book is "a must-read for everyone who gets to write for, design, or otherwise influence a user's digital experience." The emphasis on "gets to" there is my own. Being a UX designer really is a privilege. We have a duty to do it kindly.
References
DE VOIL, Nick. 2020. User Experience Foundations. BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.
HERTZ, Noreena. 2020. The Lonely Century: A Call to Reconnect. Hodder & Stoughton.
KANE, Lexie. 2019. 'Interface Copy Impacts Decision Making'. Available at: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/interface-copy-decision-making/ [accessed on 10 July 2022].
MARSH, Matt. 2017. People Shaped: Tales and Tricks of a Human Centred Designer.
NARAYANAN, Arvind and Shannon Vallor. 2014. 'Why Software Engineering Courses Should Include Ethics Coverage'. Communications of the ACM, 57(3), 23–25.
NORMAN, Don. 2013. The Design of Everyday Things. Basic Books.
PODMAJERSKY, Torrey. 2019. Strategic Writing for UX. United States of America: O'Reilly Media.
Comments