The State Of Responsible UX

What’s considered “Responsible” in the context of User Experience Design has shifted from product execution, to how digital services (and the companies behind them) behave when you’re not directly interacting with them.

In 2016, a group of us at Topp published a piece called Responsible IoT (“R.Iot”). Having worked for several years on IoT projects, we realized it was time to articulate some of the foundational questions designers need to ask when designing connected devices.

The article was born out of worry more than anything else. We’d seen IoT products end up in landfills less than a year after launch. We’d seen hardware designed to last for decades, running digital experiences that would be obsolete in months. We’d seen a lot of dishonest products, and cynical products of questionable value to the user. We’d also seen data privacy go from a fringe concern to something that was impacting everyone, with very few solutions in sight.

We could see even more problems on the horizon, and needed to articulate the arguments that would help our clients make better decisions about what IoT products to make, what to reconsider, and what to avoid.

“Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should” — we argued. Not always successfully.

These days, it’s difficult to separate the design of an IoT product from any other digital product — it’s all some form of User Experience (UX). As UX design has matured as a discipline, the average UX designer has become more multifaceted. Designing responsibly is one of these facets.

Designing responsibly is such a common discussion topic at conferences and in forums that it’s taken on a life of its own. A Google search for “responsible design” gets 1.6 million hits. But what’s considered responsible UX today is less about how you implement a product interface, and more about the background actions of the company behind it: strategy, data management, service agreements, customer relationships, and so on.

So what has changed?

1 — Ethical concerns are raised earlier.

Conversations about the social implications, ethical concerns, and unintended consequences of a new product are more commonplace today than a few years ago, and they’re raised earlier in the project. We see clients raising their own concerns about product ideas, in structured and constructive ways, before we as the design team have a chance to point them out.

Example: Parental Control

One example of how ethical concerns result in new products is the growing issue of how minors interact with them. This has given rise to a wide range of solutions: children’s accounts, children’s versions of products, and parent portals that give parents more control over their children’s digital life and data. We’re even looking now at the possibility of devices that can proactively detect if the user is a child.

2 — Digital products are treated like continuous relationships, like a service.

One of the biggest changes in digital products in recent years is the shift from a single release to an ongoing service with continuous development. A product’s user experience is now intended to evolve over time, so it must be maintained and continuously improved upon by the provider, in alignment with their product strategy.

This means that users’ relationships with the companies behind digital products are also changing. It’s no longer a product that you’re convinced to pay for once; it’s a subscription that must continuously reaffirm its value. And ongoing relationships need ongoing maintenance.

Design Skills Needed Throughout the Organisation

This shift towards services has brought changes in how designers work day-to-day, especially as their formerly niche design skills make their way into departments throughout the company. Designers, and their inherent user-value perspective, are increasingly considered to be core team members from start to finish, while developing products & strategy as well as working with innovation.

Example: Smart Fridge

For one example of how digital products are treated like services, look at the screen interfaces on smart appliances. Previously, the screen and its GUI became outdated much faster than the appliance itself. As more companies push software updates over the air, the combined longevity of appliances + screen is improved. It might not be so easy to update the resolution of a screen, but at least its GUI is able to age more gracefully. This is making companies more aware of how quickly a “trendy” GUI can look dated, prompting them to look for designs that can withstand time.

Screens in home appliances probably aren’t going away anytime soon, but they could be superseded by screen-less interactions like voice controls.

3 — Live experiments are part of the development process.

Beyond just prototypes — which are now standard practice in pretty much any design effort — we’re also seeing a growing demand for early minimal-effort product experiments, as a way of facilitating decisions and informing long term product strategy. This is part of a bigger move towards opening up the digital product development process, by continuously running in-market and live experiments on smaller user groups (also called “user engagement”).

More Focus on Experimentation and User Engagement

This effort goes hand in hand with creating digital products that continuously evolve, as user engagement informs product desirability, and helps us determine which concepts are worth moving forward. This allows you to examine your expectations of how well a digital product will be received, and how feasible it is to build. This is a positive change towards a healthier UX practice with a better ability to execute more responsible UX design.

Increased user engagement also shines a light on what’s actually responsible practice. When you seek out users and engage them directly, this tends to become apparent quickly.

Example: Small Scale Testing

A good example of the demand for (live) experiments is the common practice of companies sourcing testers amongst their employees and existing users to run early tests, before deciding on larger scale development. Tech sites report on the latest tests run by Facebook and Spotify. Connected products like Volvo M are also doing small-scale user testing while iterating a product.

4 — Privacy is explained, and a value proposition.

Products and services have become better at explaining their privacy policies, out of necessity. Most are keen on communicating that they can be trusted with your data. Legal text that was once completely impenetrable is increasingly summarised in natural language, and users are more often given the option to “opt-in” (rather than the presumptuous opt-out) when signing up for services. We’re also seeing installation guides and out-of-box experiences that provide recommendations on how to manage your privacy, and what considerations to make even after installing a smart home product.

Explaining Data Privacy is Responsible

Digital products have expanded far beyond the screen, and connected products have more autonomy than in the early days of IoT. As humans are removed from the transactions and replaced by machine-to-machine or AI-to-AI protocols, conversations emerge about what is reasonable for a user to control, or even understand?

Example: Explaining Privacy

For many companies, privacy concerns have moved out from legal documents and on to corporate sites in the form of policies and statements. We also see this trend in product set-up flows, such as when Google Nest casually adds a reminder to consider that a guest’s interactions with the device are stored along with the user’s.

5 — GDPR arrived.

The roll-out of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was a wake-up call to many companies. Data privacy is now an early contract concern. While GDPR is only applied in the European Union, its existence has had global effects. Even suspicion that a new concept or feature is unable to adhere to GDPR can kill it while still in ideation.

We’re still waiting for broader adoption of more user-friendly data management control panels!

So, what’s on the horizon?

Improved Digital Products and Services Through Science

Studies on how digital products impact our lives will guide the development of better UX practices, improved interaction patterns, and more realistic priorities for their function. When studies showed that notifications cause micro-stress, it forced designers to re-evaluate best practices for how to use and display them.

Trust Becomes (Even More) Central

One way of summarizing the current state of responsible UX is to acknowledge that companies want to create more trust around their product. The link between trust and loyalty is undeniable. Companies increasingly want you to choose to trust them with your data, and in exchange, you get a more carefully designed digital product.

This helps explain why more companies are talking about social impact, policies, and actions for sustainability on their websites. We’re likely to see companies trying out a wide variety of ways to confirm to users that they are indeed worth trusting.

More Contempt Towards “Immoral” Companies

While designers are getting better at helping clients create more responsible digital products, the general public is also more likely to notice when products and companies don’t act responsibly. And unlike governments, consumers are concerned not just with legal adherence, but also moral and ethical behavior.

As companies strive to demonstrate their responsibility through better data transparency and privacy policies, how effective they’ll be depends heavily on users’ trust in their messaging. Do users trust a product to do no harm? The trust in a product is hinged on the ethics and actions of the company behind it. In 2018 and 2019 we saw several companies come under increasing scrutiny, and even saw some products boycotted, as their leaders and policy makers were dragged through the news. The Facebook security breach and Uber’s string of scandals come immediately to mind. Is it possible to retain trust for a company’s product when users start to have doubts about the company’s behaviour on the whole?

It’s not just designers and users who are reacting to companies’ actions around digital responsibility — expect legislators to force their hands too. They might soon be legally required to take more responsibility as well.

What “Responsible design” is, when that happens, is hard to know. But it will continue to change.