Is Accountability Built Into Your Design Process?
Social movements and public opinion underscore the need for a new way of doing things. What role can designers play?
Does it ever feel like leadership has decoupled from accountability? The decisions businesses and governments make can affect the economy, workforce, environment, and society in profound ways. That kind of power demands accountability. Leaders, even those who explicitly want to make a positive impact on the world, need a way to be held to high standards. Can they live their values and maintain integrity under stress or while facing challenges? Staying on course requires an external but invested force to hold up a mirror to them in moments of uncertainty or decision-making.
To maintain accountability, leaders need strong relationships built on trust and intention. I believe designers are pivotal to ensuring that accountability isn’t an afterthought.
The Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT-ID) emphasized in its 2020 report design’s central role in realizing executive vision. In it, we learn that a diverse group of design and business professionals “believe that design can empower organizations to operate with greater integrity and thus better relate to audiences and consumers.” I agree that designers are in the unique position to act.
There are real ways designers can lead teams toward greater accountability to all stakeholders. At Salesforce, we’ve been thinking about this for a while. Our conversations led to the development of a creative practice that drives social and business value by building strong relationships. It’s called Relationship Design and the Get to Know Relationship Design Trail on Trailhead can help you dive deeper. The seven modules in the trail will give you a lot to think about. In the meantime, I’ll highlight some tactics that you can apply immediately.
Build accountability into your design process
Designers can help drive a vision or a product toward measurable business goals. So it’s important to weave accountability checkpoints into the design process from the beginning. Having to retrofit accountability is difficult and expensive, especially when values and reputation are at stake.
The methods that follow can act as accountability prompts in the design process.
1. Try Ecosystem Mapping
Early in a project or initiative, it’s important to map out the accountability structure. Note how different, and sometimes conflicting, agendas can influence the work. Identify who’s involved in moving an idea forward. This is called ecosystem mapping and it’s a process we use to capture the key people or teams that influence a product or service. For example:
- Decision makers are project sponsors who decide whether or not to green-light a project and approve decisions about how it’ll work, feel, and look, and how the organization will support it.
- Influencers (hierarchical) are internal individuals with the power to shape how an idea is developed or received. My favorite type of influencer (non-hierarchical) is one whose authentic excitement can rally others.
- Other key individuals and groups are customer service teams, the makers or builders shaping the project, and others affected by the product or service.
Next, describe each stakeholder’s motivations and goals for the project, and identify the champions and detractors.
Then, plot the stakeholders on a two-by-two diagram based on their level of influence in the organization, and their stake in the initiative. When you map your project ecosystem, and consider the many goals and perspectives in play, stop to think about accountability. Whom can you collaborate with to increase the positive impact of your work? Do you need to temper any agendas in order to remain accountable to stakeholders? Highlighting these issues early minimizes surprises later and having to reshape an idea to address accountability.
2. Set Up Corporate Integrity Workshops
A corporate integrity workshop brings a team comes together to examine whether its products or services are in line with its values. Here’s how a corporate integrity workshop works: First, identify the values the product currently expresses. Then compare the responses to the company’s core values and/or a set of values the team agrees the product should represent. If you’ve never evaluated it through the values lens, you’ll likely find room for improvement in your product. Call out anything that’s not in alignment and propose changes that can better express those values. It might be tweaking a feature, building a new one, or even retiring one that doesn’t serve the values.
Try this thought experiment: Put together a type of product with three good values. What do you get? Then switch to three different values that are also good and picture it again. For example, what if a mapping app expressed the values of belonging, fun, and discovery? Now what if it expressed efficiency, minimalism, and intelligence? You get two totally different app experiences, right? This is why it’s important to be intentional about values in your product or experience. Talk openly about them with your team.
My favorite example to illustrate how values are expressed through product is a popular calendaring app. It’s a tool that lets people book time on another person’s calendar without having to know their schedule. It removes the typical back-and-forth communication required to schedule time with someone outside your organization. The first time a friend sent me a link to this tool, it irritated me. Upon reflection, I realized my values are based on relationship norms, but the tool prioritizes efficiency. This mismatch made me question the power dynamics in my friendship.
Efficiency isn’t a “bad” value–I think efficiency is a good value. But, context matters. If I’d received the link from a doctor’s office, I wouldn’t have balked. Part of what makes products interesting is the combination of values they express. And, intentional or not, those values often represent the values of the team that built the product.
3. Engage the Team in Consequence Scanning Workshops
Consequence scanning workshops are purposefully created to insert friction into the product development process. Moments of pause and consideration at the right time in the process are some of the best ways we can advocate for responsible technology and innovation. Doteveryone created this framework in 2015 for engineers. At Salesforce, we evolved it to fit how we work and released our version as part of our Build With Intention Toolkit. With design work typically coming upstream of development, designers are in a great position to lead the exercise.
A sample agenda includes questions that help teams think differently such as:
- “Have you considered security, reliability, support, monitoring, and ease of comprehension for your users?”
- “What could this mean for well-being and relationships?”
- “How would the communities where you operate be affected if everyone in the world were doing this?”
- “How could this affect different markets and people in their professional lives?”
Spending time to ask “what if?” can build moral muscle memory and uncover a team’s weak points. I’ve experienced the benefits of this process firsthand. The best part is that it raises the ethical questions–which rarely have clear right and wrong answers–in a way that the whole team can engage with them. Once these ethical issues have surfaced in a workshop, it’s important to carry them through to your team’s daily work of designing inclusively.
4. Practice Inclusive Design
As designers, we determine who gets to use our products and services, and who gets left out. This is one of the places where our accountability to the business might be in tension with our accountability to our community. The business often wants us to launch as fast as possible, with the minimum effort needed to ship the product, and a focus on bare-bones functionality. But we know that if our product isn’t designed with a diversity of ways for people to participate, we risk alienating part of our community, and our market.
Inclusive design is the practice of designing solutions that offer a diversity of ways for people to participate in and contribute to an experience. As inclusive designers, we can challenge the status quo. Yes, it may be imperfect. But we can approach these questions with a willingness to be curious.
To build up your skills, start with our inclusive design module. This lens will help you identify ability biases and mismatched interactions between people and the world. This could be anything from a website with mouse-only navigation or an app with low color contrast. When we look, we’ll find opportunities to design different ways for people to engage.
5. Create an Ethics Council
Don’t do it alone! To create a systematic way to integrate accountability in your process, you can form an ethics council that will hold you accountable. The ethics council should consist of people outside of your immediate team’s reporting structure and they should have the authority to call out potential issues. There’s no magic size for the group, but it should be small enough that trust can run deep. Meet with the group regularly to discuss feedback or open questions, and review priorities related to values and ethics. It’s not the ethics council’s job to agree. They’re intentionally engaged in a multi-stakeholder dialogue to help our business be a force for good. To create your ethics council, start with a diverse body of stakeholders, including designers.
As part of our work, some designers help articulate an organization’s values, navigate difficult questions, and find the connections between values and customers. Designers can help companies express their values in the products they develop, making sure to ask the right accountability questions to keep everyone on track. This vocabulary and experience mean designers make great members of ethics councils. At Salesforce, our council includes users and non-users (e.g. academics, ethicists and key community members). This brings in unique viewpoints on the issues we care about most. They mirror back to us how we are doing.
Whether we’re mapping stakeholder perspectives, assessing values, scanning for consequences, or checking our ethics, designers are the ideal partners to steward accountability. We can help shape the conscience of organizations in so many ways, ensuring that accountability remains a priority. We can bring innovative thinking to business and the community, identify shared goals, and envision experiences that satisfy them. With these methods in our toolkit, designers and our teams can get closer to our goal of using our work to make the world a better place.
MORE RESOURCES
How Salesforce Is Building a Culture of Responsible Technology — and Why it Matters
5 Ways Designers Lead with Reciprocity
What Designers Need to Know About WEF’s New “Ethics by Design” Report
What It Looks Like to Lead with Intention
Acknowledgements: Special thanks to Kate Hughes and Hsiao-Ching Chou for your editorial expertise, to the Salesforce Office of Ethical and Humane Use of Technology for collaboration on these methods, and to Pooja Merai for your Ecosystem Mapping format. It takes a village, y’all.
Salesforce Design is dedicated to elevating design and advocating for its power to create trusted relationships with users, customers, partners, and the community. We share knowledge and best practices that build social and business value. We call this next evolution of design Relationship Design. Join our Design Trailblazers community, become a certified UX designer, or work with us!
