The Privilege of Ethical Design
When was the last time you considered your responsibility to this world? Your responsibility to society? Have you considered how the decisions you make in your profession might affect those around you? Are you privileged enough to do something about it?
I am.
While the concept isn’t new, there’s recently been a huge shift to be more ethically considerate in product design. To design with a sense of responsibility for society at large. As a product designer I’ve always understood that my job is to design a product that allows the user to complete their task(s) in as few steps as possible. That’s the most basic principle and then you throw a whole lot of nuance into it. A little technical limitation here, an accessibility consideration there… but mainly, business objectives. What does your boss need this user to do while they complete their tasks? Maybe click on a few ads, get all their friends to use it, buy a few things? Maybe become completely addicted and form an unhealthy relationship with their mobile device? — Making ethical considerations means that designers are becoming more influential in not just how these business objectives come to life, but whether they come to life at all.
“Social design is design that is mindful of the designer’s role and responsibility in society; and the use of the design process to bring about social change.[1] Social design is also a critical discipline that challenges the pure market-orientedness of conventional design practice, and attempts to see past, into a more inclusive conception of design, in which user groups who are marginalized are also given priority.”
Source: Wikipedia
The beauty of working in the tech industry is that change comes fast. I believe that also happens to be one of it’s scariest attributes. Government, by comparison, is designed intentionally to move slow. The bureaucracy is intended to force its stewards to consider the consequence of any change. If you ever get a chance, take a deeper look into your local government. I wonder if the speed at which change happens affects how we prioritize or even simply consider the ethical implications of the things we make.
One company leading the ethical charge is IDEO. I had the pleasure of seeing them present one of their projects at a conference last year. The idea was simple: make voting easier… for everyone. The problems were many but one stuck with me: the solution needed to last at least 20 years. My colleagues and I were blown away by their work and I walked away hoping it wouldn’t have to play the sit and wait game for too long. It was a nice surprise to find the official Voting Solutions for All People website last month:
“In 2020, Los Angeles County will transition from polling places to vote centers. This new model will allow voters to cast a ballot at any vote center location in the County over an 11-day period. The Vote Center Placement Project’s (VCPP) core mission is to identify and place accessible and convenient vote center locations throughout Los Angeles County.”
I don’t believe designers set out to be unethical in their designs, at least not anyone I know or know of. How many of us with Twitter “join dates” going back to 2008 thought that Twitter or even Facebook would change the world? How many of their designers do you think felt the same? So much of what we do can feel trivial, especially in the beginning. Let’s review a few design decisions that may have seemed harmless initially but proved to have greater ethical and social implications.
Facebook’s Algorithm
Intent: show the user what they’re most interested in seeing so that they’ll use the app for longer and maybe click a few ads
Consequence: After over a year of debating what role Facebook’s algorithm played in the 2016 election, I think it’s safe to say the consequences were many
Twitter’s Verification Badge
Intent: make it easier for a user to tell if a person is actually who they claim they are
Consequence: some users read the badge as Twitter’s endorsement of select users while others take the badge to mean that the user is trustworthy
Park/Bus Benches
Intent: allow users to feel more comfortable sitting next to strangers
Consequence: makes it difficult, if not impossible, for homeless people to sleep on those benches
Note: It has been argued, and rightly so, that this consequence is intentional and just another product of hostile architecture.
GoGuardian’s Self-Harm Smart Alerts
Note: GoGuardian is an educational technology company that helps k-12 schools keep students away from harmful online content. Full disclosure, I work for GoGuardian and contributed to both products mentioned here.
Intent: notify school IT administrators of students’ browsing online activity related to self-harm and suicide using existing infrastructure
Consequence: some IT administrators felt they were not equipped to handle these types of notifications and had a hard time taking a break due to concerns about urgency
We’ve seen Facebook’s attempts at making it right. Twitter’s solution seems to be to get more people verified. Those park bench dividers don’t seem to be going anywhere, unfortunately. But if you end up in a local government town hall like I suggested earlier maybe you can effect change in your own community. As far as our own Self-Harm Smart Alerts? The product was successful in that it shone a light on just how pervasive a problem mental health is for kids. It has literally saved lives. So we could have stopped there and convinced ourselves that saving lives was worth any unexpected consequence. Instead we went back to the drawing board.
With suicide prevention as our only goal, we focused our research on how schools handle mental health in general and suicidal ideation in particular. It was really important to me that whatever we created complemented the appropriate user’s existing processes and the school’s existing policies and protocols. Dealing with suicide and self-harm related incidents is hard enough, the least we could do is try to align in a way that reduced the amount of unnecessary stress. This fall, we’ll be releasing GoGuardian Beacon. Not a solution but a suicide prevention tool designed specifically for the people best equipped to handle these types of notifications: school mental health professionals. Our team worked really hard to consider the social, emotional and psychological implications of a tool like this for all parties involved: school staff, students and parents. We also considered how a more complete experience right out of the gate (compared to a typical MVP) would more positively affect our users given the subject matter. All praise due to our product manager, Nickelle Presley, who has fiercely defended that decision ever since. It won’t be perfect, but we’re really proud of our process and committed to getting it right.
Unfortunately, the privilege of being able to apply ethical considerations in designs is not common. Not to say that I wield an unordinary amount of influence here at GoGuardian. My privilege lies in leadership that is willing to listen. Willing to be convinced that a product’s minimum viability should include considerations about its ethicality. Willing to quickly admit where we’ve gone wrong and allow us to correct course accordingly.
