UX Upskill | Hyper Island
Placebo buttons, dark patterns and deception. Exploring the role of ethics in UX and why it matters.
For the first time, in all my design education, I have a designated module focusing only on ethics. Not just a few hours of GDPR and inclusive design, but 2 weeks on the broader scope of ethics. Still not that long, but long enough to dive a bit deeper on the issue.
Ethics is a system of moral principles that is concerned with what is good or bad for individuals and society. It’s derived from the Greek word “ethikos” which means character or disposition (Wikipedia).
At the start of this module my understanding of ethics in relation to UX was blurry. I knew it concerned privacy issues, inclusive/accessible design and an overall idea to do good and not work for evil companies 😈
After two weeks of lectures, reflection, articles, videos, webinars and related literature my understanding has expanded in all directions, so much that I struggled to find where to begin this article. There are so many aspects; the most well known (I think) are accessibility, inclusion and privacy protection, this is at least what I knew of before starting this module, but then I learned about other issues that I was less aware of and even unaware of. One of them were placebo buttons.
Did you know that the world is full of buttons that don’t work? (I didn’t)
Buttons with apparent functionality, but no physical effect. They are often called placebo buttons and appear to work by giving a reaction, which gives the user an illusion of control. The buttons are often found in places where they would have once been useful, but now the system operates automatically. Although these buttons are deceiving, they do not harm the user, instead they serve a purpose since they actually help the user on a psychological level because taking some action leads people to feel a sense of control over a situation and that feels good, rather than just being a passive bystander. (Ellen Langer)
In this case the deception is used to benefit the user, but is it ethical even though it causes no harm? In one aspect I would think yes, since it really does no harm, but then again they are deceiving the user, so I’m not sure 🤔.
The goal of a UX designer is to always improve the experience for the user. In this case the deception actually improves the user experience, but even so i guess it would be important to test with real users to see how they would react and be transparent (in the end) about how the buttons work (or don’t work) to gauge their overall reaction to the concept.
If this harmless ethical dilemma already cause confusion, I can imagine there are way more complex dilemmas out there that would need a lot more focus and consideration to reach good ethical decisions.
Before I look further at ethics though I want to look at the role and purpose of UX through history.
Purpose and history
The purpose of UX has always been to enhance the experience a user has when interacting with a product or service, by talking to and testing with potential users.
UX design has been around way before the internet though, not with the same term, but cognitive scientist and usability engineer Don Normans best selling book The Design of Everyday Things, first published in 1988, with the title The Psychology of Everyday Things talks about how design serves as the communication between object and user, and how to optimize that conduit of communication in order to make the experience of using the object pleasurable.
So UX has been around for a long time in some form, but according to Mark Hurst, it has been a slippery slope with how it has been used and applied during the last decades. In his article Why I’m losing faith in UX he divides it into three decades:
- The Golden Era 1997–2007
Companies actually listened to users in order to serve them better. - The Slide 2008–2018
UX teams loose influence in organizations and data/algorithms starts to gain more importance than UX. - The Redefinition 2018…
The tech industry today, led by Big Tech Companies such as Facebook, Amazon etc. increasingly use the tools and methodologies of UX, not to improve the user experience, but instead to exploit the user.
This is a disturbing development. During this module I have become much more aware of these exploitative methods and once I started noticing them I saw them everywhere. They are often referred to as dark patterns.
Dark patterns
When applying insight gained through UX research to deceive users to gain business benefits instead of helping the user.
I guess dark patterns also have been around since before the internet, for example in form of the fine print at the bottom of letters that few people was able to read or understand, but online it has taken a much more insidious form. There are lots of different types of dark patterns (you can find them all here), but here are some examples I found:
Roach Motel: You get into a situation easily, but when you want to leave its almost impossible to get out (e.g. The cancellation procedure for Amazon Prime)
Confirmshaming: Guilting the user into opting into something. The option to decline is worded in such a way as to shame the user into compliance.
Disguised Ads: Adverts that are disguised as other kinds of content or navigation, in order to get you to click on them. This example is actually marked as an ad (with small grey text), but the layout blends in with the rest of the news so can easily be taken for an editorial article.
Forced Continuity: When your free trial with a service comes to an end and your credit card starts getting charged without any warning.
Dark patterns is not the only reason why ethics matter in UX though.
Unintended consequences
More severe problems, are products that behave in unintended ways like Amazon Alexa which records conversations by accident. A woman got her private conversation with her husband recorded and shared with random contacts. I’m sure the designers never meant for this to happen, but they probably didn’t have time to reflect around it either?
Another is Strava, the running app who track subscribers activity. Based on data from their users they created a “heatmap” showing the paths users logged. What they probably didn’t consider was that soldiers also use the app without turning off tracking and that they then contribute to mapping out military bases (sometimes secret) that are active.
Code of ethics
We live in a world with increasingly advanced technology; smart houses, self driving cars, virtual humans, AI, humanoide robots and the future will for sure bring us even more insane products we cant even imagine yet.
Human centered design is also being challenged by algorithms, manipulative interfaces and business models that don’t have the users best interest at heart. According to Tristan Harris (former design ethicist at Google) the harms of technology are self-reinforcing and include the reduction of attention span, distraction, information overload, polarization of politics, breakdown of trust, narcissism, mental health, social isolation, deep fakes and much much more…
Taking all this into consideration, the importance of an ethical code and time to consider ethics as part of the design process is becoming alarmingly critical. Other professions that perform activities that can harm humans, have ethical codes or oaths they swear by; doctors, nurses, engineers, even architects.
Designers have nothing.
“A man [in this case a designer] without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.” (Camus)
If we had an ethical code more designers would hopefully feel the responsibility to stand up, fight and say no when necessary. We might also feel less alone in doing so, knowing that we would have some sort of common backing from other designers.
“There are two words every designer needs to feel comfortable saying: “no” and “why.” If we cannot ask “why” we lose the ability to judge whether the work we’re doing is ethical. If we cannot say “no” we lose the ability to stand and fight. We lose the ability to help shape the thing we’re responsible for shaping.” (Mike Monteiro, Design’s Lost Generation)
Ethics on a global scale
Even if more designers took a stand, reflected, said no when necessary and used ethics as part of their creation process, there are also authoritarian countries, like China where it might not be so easy for designers to do this. It becomes even more problematic when such countries takes the lead in a technology and starts exporting it. A good example is how China use facial recognition to control human behavior and discriminate between people by for example training algorithms to distinguish faces of Uyghur people, a predominantly Muslim minority ethnic group in China, from those of Korean and Tibetan ethnicity. Several countries have started using their technology.
Critics and human rights campaigners have accused Beijing and the surveillance companies of “exporting authoritarianism” via the technology that has been used at home as part of a security crackdown that has led to the detention of more than 1.8 million people, predominantly Uighur Muslims, in the Xinjiang region. (Los Angeles Times)
This is frightening and yet another reminder how essential ethics is. How can we avoid situations like this? Is ethics enough? Maybe we also need laws to control certain aspects. Ethics is still an important first step though, then laws can be created for the most critical issues, to protect people from the worst consequences of unintended or intended design/business/product decisions.
The role of the designer
A designers role is defined by their job, position and company. Their responsibilities are defined by the tasks/project at hand, but what about accountability? Who is held accountable? Who takes ownership when unintended consequences happen? Can and should designers be held accountable, not just responsible? This is definitely something that would make a designer more careful when making design decisions and not just doing what might be expected of them, but instead questioning things when necessary.
When you are hired to design something, you are hired for your expertise. Your job is not just to produce that work but to evaluate the impact of that work. Your job is to relay the impact of that work to your client or employer. And should that impact be negative, it is your job to relay that to your client along with a way, if possible, to eliminate the negative impact of the work. If it’s impossible to eliminate the negative impact of the work, it’s your job to stop it from seeing the light of day. (Mike Monteiro A Designer’s Code of Ethics)
Even if we as designers might not always be held accountable, we should always be responsible and aware of ethical issues. We need to find our own values that can guide us in doing the right thing. Reading, sharing and discussing with other designers will also help spreading awareness and keeping ourselves up to date.
The future of ethics in UX
Philosophers divide ethics into three levels, ranging from the very abstract to the concrete.
- Meta Ethics: Concerns itself with the nature of morality itself
What does it mean when someone says something is good or bad? - Normative Ethics: Establish guidelines/principles for how one ought to act or live.
- Applied Ethics: How we interpret these guidelines and principles
in context, and how do they translate into real life
Normative and applied ethics seems most relevant for UX. Some common guidelines should be established and then applied in real projects. During this ethics module and through research I found quite a lot of activity around this topic.
For instance, there is a renewed interest in the “First thing first” design manifesto written and published in 1964 by Ken Garland. It then rallied against the consumerist culture and tried to highlight a Humanist dimension in graphic design theory. It has later been republished with a new group of signatories as the First Things First 2000 manifesto. It was again renewed in 2020 as the firstthingsfirst2020.org
Some companies are stepping up, like Spotify, who have created an ethical assessment sheet that their teams are encouraged to use when creating new products.
I also found ethicsfordesigners.com that share skills and toolkits of practical resources for approaching design from an ethical perspective.
During these two weeks I even stumbled across a webinar called Ethics Matter where almost 500 people from all over the world attended. Not many if you think of the total population of the world, but for such a narrow topic the people running it were positively surprised. So it seems like the awareness of ethics is growing in many ways.
Final reflection
These two weeks have been eye opening and even though I’m just scratching the surface it has made a big impact. I’m overwhelmed by the range of issues where ethics should and need to play a role.
I will apply ethics in my professional life by discussing ethical issues with fellow designers and always raise my concern if I feel something is wrong. Also becoming more aware of my personal values will make it easier to take a stand.
The image below summarizes the values that we, as a class, think will help guide us in the future.
Thank you Sonja Rattay for sharing your knowledge with so much enthusiasm and for making me more aware.
