Creating Values and Ethics-Oriented Changes at Tech Companies through Everyday UX Work
This post summarizes the paper “Tactics of Soft Resistance in User Experience Professionals’ Values Work” by Richmond Y. Wong, published in the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5: CSCW (Oct 2021), which received an honorable mention award. The full research paper can be downloaded and read here (open access). The paper will also be presented at the CSCW 2021 (Computer Supported Cooperative Work ) conference.
In recent years, technology workers have taken a range of public actions that contest, resist, or attempt to change the companies they work for including worker walkouts, whistleblowing, or public letter writing. Many of these actions address social values or ethical issues, such as gender equity, workplace diversity, or concerns about products and services causing harm to people.
This research paper focuses on a set of complementary, but often less public, actions that user experience (UX) professionals use in their everyday work to contest, resist, or attempt to change the companies they work for.
The paper highlights the values work done by UX professionals — the everyday practices conducted in the name of addressing social values or ethical issues — and how some of these practices attempt to re-shape the companies they work for. This research is based on interviews with UX professionals who work at large U.S. technology companies and participant observations at public events for UX and technology professionals in the San Francisco Bay Area.
It outlines a range of tactics that broadly work towards three types of changes:
1. Creating space for UX expertise to address values
Responsibility for addressing values and ethical issues can be spread across different stakeholders who might approach a values problem with a different set of methods, and tools (e.g., values as a legal compliance problem, values as a public relations problem, or values as a requirements engineering problem). Tactics used towards this goal help show how UX expertise and knowledge can help address values. One example is using UX and user researcher expertise to advocate for broadening who the company considers as a “user” when doing user research, to make sure that the company is addressing a more diverse set of needs or not causing harm to marginalized communities.
2. Making values visible and relevant to others in the organization
Given that UX professionals often don’t have decision-making power over product decisions, some of their tactics attempt to get other organizational stakeholders into consider values. An example here is a UX professional t re-framing social values and ethical issues in terms of reputational harm or financial risk (instead of framing them in user-centered terms) in order to make the issues relevant for product managers.
3. Changing organizational processes and orientations towards values
Other practices attempt to more explicitly change or shape the organization. For instance, some UX professionals will utilize their companies’ public commitments or statements around corporate values and ethics statements, but subtly re-work or push those values forward in more explicit social justice oriented ways.
While these tactics can lead to useful outcomes — fruitful internal discussions that help UX professionals find allies, changes to product decisions, or the creation of new internal resources — these attempts at change are also partial in what they can achieve. In order to be legible to organizational decision-makers, these tactics to attempt to change large technology companies utilize some of the same logics or framing that can lead to the ethical problem in the first place — such as framing ethical issues in terms of financial risk or financial return. Furthermore, not all ethical issues can be easily framed in this way. The paper uses the concept of soft resistance (a term developed by Jaime Sherman & Dawn Nafus) to understand how these UX professionals try to resist the practices done by their tech company employers, while still trying to be at least partially legible to organizational decision-makers.
These tactics of values work and soft resistance represent attempts to change technology organizations from positions within, and often from positions “below,” given that UX professionals often don’t have as much power or prestige as other technology professions. There are of course limits when working from within corporate structures — and we’ve seen firings and dismissals of tech workers who are seen by their companies as pushing too far on ethics-related issues. Many interviewees discussed the tensions and ambivalences they felt about trying to create change from within — are they pushing hard enough? What do you do if you only have enough social capital to advocate for one ethical issue out of many? How can this work be sustained if values and ethics advocates leave (or are dismissed) from the company?
At the same time, these are not ineffective practices, some forms of change are possible. When thinking about ethical change and technology companies, we might consider these tactics from within as complementary to other ongoing efforts to create ethical change, such as law & policy, worker organizing, shareholder activism, or public backlash.
This research has some implications for a range of stakeholders involved in values & ethics in design:
For designers and researchers developing new values & ethics design tools, a lot of current design tools focus on addressing ethics during the technical design process, but this research suggests that a lot of UX professionals’ values work exists outside of the design process. We might move from thinking about values centered design to values advocate centered design, to support this social and organizational work.
Values & ethics design tools can also better account for the positionality of UX and design in large corporations. A lot of design tools for ethics imagine that they can be successfully used by an empowered designer, but often they don’t actually have that kind of power or agency in practice.
For frontline practitioners, the tactics described in the paper suggest points of intervention to discuss or address values & ethical issues. For practitioners in higher positions of power, the research suggests finding ways to empower and compensate frontline workers who are doing values work.
More broadly, this research suggests studying and supporting values work that can happen in many places and take on multiple forms: within and beyond the technical design process; inside and outside of large technology companies; and through social, organizational and political practices as well as technical ones.
Paper citation: Richmond Y. Wong. 2021. Tactics of Soft Resistance in User Experience Professionals’ Values Work. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5, CSCW2, Article 355 (October 2021), 28 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3479499
