How might we empower UX designers to create ethical designs
A Figma plugin featuring industry examples and resources to help novice designers create ethical designs.
Persuasive Design, Fall 2021 MHCI @Carnegie Mellon
🍞 Team Kaya Toast
Kyra Low
Carolyn Zhong
Miley Hu
Sally Chen
Konomi Nakajima
Taeyoung Yun
Background
Dark patterns are user interfaces carefully crafted to exploit users, leading them towards behaviors in line with the company’s interests, such as hidden fees and subscriptions. Novice UX designers are not knowledgeable enough about dark UX patterns and apply them without fully understanding their impact. Additionally, designers are often required to balance the user needs and business goals, making them vulnerable to implementing dark patterns. Still, UX designers need to be knowledgeable about the dark patterns and persuade project managers and other people to reduce the use of dark patterns to prevent them from taking advantage of users. We created Angel UX Patterns to mitigate this problem, a Figma plugin that features industry examples and resources to help novice designers create more ethical designs.
Goals
- Increasing novice designers’ awareness of dark patterns
- Empowering designers to guide and encourage people in the product development team to mitigate the use of dark patterns
- Providing a practical tool for creating ethical design
Final Design
The plugin’s name “Angel UX Patterns” primes users about the goal of the product and steers them toward higher moral grounds before they start using it.
The home page shows collections of design examples categorized by features and companies, guiding the user to grasp the general idea of what the plugin offers.
After the user searches or clicks on one of the collections, they will be taken to a corresponding results page, featuring all relevant examples, common dark patterns, and good practices relevant to the feature or the company they search for. In the common dark pattern section, the user can click on sub-categories of dark patterns, which will provide more in-depth information about the specific dark patterns accompanied by real-world examples. The “good practices tab” features a list of resources from big tech companies and design agencies to provide additional guidance on designing a good checkout page. This employs the persuasive design technique, “social proof,” and “authority” to promote more ethical design practices.
Lastly, The user can click on individual industry examples to view them separately. The user can see the example in an enlarged view and the dark patterns on that example via tags added by verified designers on the example detail page.
Reflection & Next Steps
Angel UX Patterns Plugin has a potential impact on educating design ethics to junior designers as well as design students. Partnering with such school programs and companies could help us promote our plugin as an essential tool for informing ethical design. Students and designers who learn about ethical design tools and practices early in their careers will incorporate them into the everyday design process and introduce them to other designers. Our ultimate vision would be this Figma plugin becoming a regular part of designers’ workflows and being a top resource for designers when creating ethical designs. We hope that this tool can encourage ethical design practices and educate novice UX designers on dark patterns.
