Responsible Design — or how much responsibility do designers really have?
By: Ellina Morits
Tags: Product Design, Design, Ethics, Responsibility, User Experience

Everyone is responsible

Our lives are filled with experiences. A well-designed product can bring delight, free our time and mental capacity for other things. On the other hand, some experiences are frustrating and can be financially detrimental or even harmful for our mental health. How responsible are we as designers?

In my current place of work, when we interview designers, we always ask how they would feel about working in the gaming industry. Personally, I have experienced judgemental glances, especially when my friend would introduce himself as a UX researcher for NHS digital alongside my introduction. I’d like to address the misconception and uncomfortable questions that people prefer to ignore. It’s very easy to point the finger at certain industries, but does it make other designers any less responsible?

Behind any product there is a relatively small team of humans who made key decisions about its design and usability. Even though the business can override design decisions, I do believe that we have the power to stand up and advocate for the users.

As controversial as Mike Monteiro’s views are, I have to agree with him on this: a designer works for the people who will use the thing being designed. As such, a designer should work in the best interests of these people, and not for the corporations who stand to profit from it.

Too much to hold designers accountable for? I don’t think so 😇

User-friendly can backfire

Courtesy of memegenerator.net

Let’s talk about user-friendly experiences. Everyone wants their product to be frictionless and seamless. However, is that always what’s best for the user long-term?

More and more designers are advocating for introducing friction. Why is that? Because by making certain experiences frictionless we are making it too easy for people to idle away hours on social media or spend money on online shopping and games.

In 2018 Norwegian Consumer Council published a report titled ‘Deceived by Design’, where they shared how certain apps are using customer data in non-transparent ways. Furthermore, the report proceeded to say that designers are often at the core of the issue, due to employing dark patterns. ‘Creating seamless and enjoyable user experiences is central to user-centered design, but this does not excuse the use of exploitative nudging. Excessive nudging toward privacy intrusive options, use of dark patterns and privacy-intrusive default settings, should in our view not be regarded as freely given or explicit consent.’ The report focused on big corporations, such as Facebook and Google.

However, we can easily see that any industry needs a responsible design approach. First examples to be named are social media with endless scrolling and streaming services with ‘watch next’, which seem to confuse ‘human need’ with convenient consumption. There has been lots of research done on the impact that streaming services like Netflix have on our health: the side effects of binge-watching range from negatively impacting sleep and posture to creating a feeling of isolation, even leading to depression; not to mention carbon dioxide emissions. Quite a high price to pay for binge-watching the new hottest tv show.

AI is another example of technology that’s meant to make our lives easier and enhance experiences in products from social media to self-driving cars and voice assistants. Design for AI is still very much a growing area, but what is the flip side of AI? As we can read in Harvard Business Review, just a few years ago discussions of ‘data ethics’ and ‘AI ethics’ were reserved for nonprofit organizations and academics. Today the biggest tech companies in the world — Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Google— are putting together fast-growing teams to tackle the ethical problems that arise from the widespread collection, analysis, and use of massive troves of data. MIT and Stanford offer not only publications, but even degrees in Ethical AI. All this leaves no doubt that if you work as a designer on a product that uses AI, you are responsible for protecting the users and giving them full transparency on the use of their data.

Taking responsibility

London College of Communication has created a Manifest on Design Responsibility. It states that ‘we have a professional duty to make sure that our inventions are not just clever, but that they are wise; that we don’t just create cool things, but that we are in alignment with a sustainable future…’ They frame design in terms of long-term impact on climate, society, and the planet. It’s very encouraging that new generations of designers are taught to have such a massive focus on sustainability when making decisions — picking form over function is not the responsible way forward.

And I fully agree with the authors of ‘User Friendly’ when they say that ‘behaviour is our medium, not products’. Designers need to accept the consequences of bringing their work into the world, not only the intentions that went into designing.

Futures Wheel

There is a framework that is not new, but still very relevant for assessing longer term impact of any product. It’s called Futures Wheel and Jerome Glenn came up with it in 1972. It’s very straightforward, but it nudges us in the right direction of thinking a few steps ahead and consider what kind of future we want to create by bringing in our work into the world.

At the end of the day, human-centred experiences always win, bringing in loyal and engaged customers. Designers have known that all along. Now we need to learn to communicate that to the business and advocate for responsible design solutions. We do have the power to change how things work and ensure that the next generation of products are ethical and ecologically and socially responsible.

Let’s remember that change through design can be achieved in any industry. Arguably, if you work in a very commercially-driven business, rather than government or non-profit you can bring even more change to people’s lives through caring and protecting them. And when we stop calling only certain teams within the business ‘sustainable’ or ‘responsible’, we’ll know that we’ve reached the goal 🙌