The Ethics of User Experience Design

The Role of Ethics in Design

I have occasionally considered the role of ethics in design. In this column, I’m using the word design in its broadest sense, as an activity and a set of outputs that all participants in the design process shape. While UX designers are not solely responsible for design decisions, personal responsibility is always a good starting point when you’re looking to change the world! Like software engineering, UX design tends to start with a simplified vision of the way the world works, making decisions based on that simplified vision. Any simplification is necessarily reductive in nature. Things get stripped away, and system boundaries are more often implied rather than drawn clearly. For example, the design process may not have considered the way the emotions Facebook engendered bled into my day or the subjective frustration I felt in response to certain online interactions.

On the whatusersdo Slack community that I sometimes visit, the topic of ethics came up during a discussion of dark patterns. This, in turn, led to speculation about what a Hippocratic Oath for UX designers might look like in practice. I like the idea of something building on the geek heritage of comic books and films—“With great power … comes great responsibility,” “Beware of the Dark Side … anger, fear, aggression, the Dark Side of the Force are they.” But I started thinking instead about an older inspiration: Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, from his short story “Runaround”:

1. “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”
2. “A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.”
3. “A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.”

Adapting these slightly for UX design, we might get:

1. A UX designer may not injure a user or, through inaction, allow a user to come to harm.
2. A UX designer must meet the business requirements except where such requirements would conflict with the First Law.
3. A UX designer must develop his or her own career as long as such development does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

I like Asimov’s approach because it considers not only what to do, but also what not to do. A UX designer cannot be a passive cog in the machine, delivering on requirements without questioning them. A good UX designer must actively question business requirements to understand what is behind them and, where necessary, challenge them. As with other professionals, UX designers may sometimes be offered work or presented with challenges that, although intellectually challenging, raise ethical issues regarding the impact of that work on users. This was the case in the story “Inside the Online Bookies”:

“We didn’t advertise our offers through email campaigns; we offered ‘suggestions on opportunities.’ We didn’t cross-sell; we ‘enhanced the interests of our users.’ Or that’s what we were told, anyway.

“The idea was to create a more bespoke, sophisticated online environment than our competitors. The doublespeak was used to conceal the fact that we were fundamentally guided by the same principles: naked self-interest and an indifference to the social harm our work could cause.”

Applying ethical thinking to UX design cannot be just about the end goal. This requires constant vigilance—regarding not only the explicit consequences of the designer’s work, but also the hidden, unintended consequences.