Design with Ethics: From Theory to Practice, Without Perishing in the Process
By Daniela Ruiz, Senior Product Designer @Resilia
“Ethical design refers to design that resists manipulative patterns, respects data privacy, encourages co-design, and is accessible and human-centered. Currently, no universally sanctioned framework exists.”
Stephen Gosset, Senior Staff Reporter at Built In
Why Do Design Ethics Matter? Why Now?
Last year I attended a webinar from Francis Restoy named “Kind Design for Organizations with Purpose.” During this talk, he invited us to be mindful of how the world runs right now and how the world’s wealth is condensed with a few people. He encouraged us as user experience designers to be accountable and thoughtful of our work’s impact on society, our work team, and ourselves. This leads me to reflect on myself as a 30-something having a career crisis, asking myself, “What’s next”? Is there a more meaningful way to do my job? Of course, designing with our users in mind is always the ultimate goal, but how can we go further?
There must be a few people in the world who are not being bombarded daily by ads, fake news, and false narratives in the media. Unfortunately, more than one of us has felt paranoid, thinking our devices can spy on us when we receive an ad for something we only mentioned in a brief chat with someone. The line between what is real and what is controlled by algorithms gets blurred daily.
As a society, we allow our digital devices to be neutral and never break down their motives. We blindly accept terms and conditions, hoping there will be some truthfulness or ethical people on the other side with our best interests in mind. However, the harsh truth is that that’s not always the case. While ideas and incredible minds are thinking and advocating for this, this is not becoming a trending topic soon.
As designers, we are often on the other side of this, exploring the human mind to identify the best place to put a banner or place a button so our users choose the more expensive option. We have a voice in conversations such as “How can we make our users believe that we are selling that miracle product and that our intentions are good?” We learn to use dark patterns without questioning whether this is right or wrong. We think and listen to what our client or business wants but don’t think enough about our end-user on the other side of every product we build.
Best Practices We Are Applying In Resilia
Today, I have the comfort of releasing most features and apps from the safety of my home or office; however, in 2021, I got to be present at the launch event of one of the mobile apps my team had been working on for months. This differed from previous releases, and there was no hiding place. I was there, exposed to 200 people using it, all questioning why we designed it the way we did and seeing the faults of the experience live.
Being a designer gives us the power to guide our users on one path. With that power comes great responsibility. Having a team at Resilia that thinks about these practices is a privilege, and we hold ourselves accountable for every decision. Here are some ways we have been applying ethical design at Resilia that your team can begin to use:
Systemic Design
Systemic Design as a practice helps us see the whole picture outside the scope of our products or platforms. We keep our users center of our thinking but ask ourselves how this product will impact society. What will be its impact?
It is the art of falling in love with the problem and not the solution, knowing, understanding, and building every aspect of it to make a better reality and understanding the consequences.
As a company, Resilia’s mission is to empower nonprofit organizations to create sustainability as they keep making a significant impact in the communities they serve; as a product team, we can’t make a tool that automatically gives them the power to change everything they need. We need to focus on a goal that has the greatest impact on the system and start working backward from there, identifying the smallest MVP we can create so that as we iterate and scale, it can eventually reach our intended outcome.
We are not only creating content or new features; we are slowly building a platform that provides our end users with the essential elements they will need to change the power dynamic with funders.
Keep Asking, Keep Searching
One of the best things about product design at Resilia is that there is no way you can know everything; there is always something new to learn.
At Resilia, curiosity is not only a valued quality but also something that is celebrated. Asking the right questions to our users, stakeholders, subject matter experts, and security experts allows us to identify upcoming risks that may have never even crossed our minds.
When I joined the team, we had the opportunity to start creating valuable tools for our funder users. It was a space we were familiar with, but we hadn’t directly talked to them, so we prepared for a discovery phase with many assumptions on what they would expect of a product and how they would interact with it.
We got several funders not only willing to test our new product but also to share their point of view and their efforts to migrate to Trust-Based Philanthropy practices; as they were voicing their experiences, we also got to learn about their challenges and understood that we had the opportunity to not only provide them value through the nonprofit platform but also help them tackle their own pain points building the Funder Platform.
Avoid Polarizing What We Hear
Empathy is the heart of being a User Experience Designer. There are times when our personal beliefs might not always align with what our customers want to get. We shouldn’t be quick to judge them as good or bad; we deep dive into understanding where they are coming from and find a way to guide them in a different direction when needed.
We understand that in the philanthropy space, not all of us are experts; some of us are still learning. One of the most common phrases I hear across teams in Resilia is that we “meet the organizations where they are.” Meeting them where they are is not about waiting for them to get where we expect them to be; it means we walk towards them and accompany them the rest of the way.
Practice What You Preach
Before jumping to every trend, like saying we are agile just because everyone thinks we should be, we ask ourselves if the practice we are trying to adopt suits us. Of course, there are no perfect companies, but before we change how we work, we ask if this is what our users expect from us, if what we say and create live up to our values and mission as a company that serves others.
You probably think we all have encountered this at least once; the vision, mission, and values tend to be phrases that companies build based on utopic concepts that sound good in theory. However, due to their nature of being created only to look good, they are impossible to achieve or even find steps to walk towards. I would also ask you if, during the interviewing process for your current job, did you ask these questions or research the company’s standing point on critical topics to you? Whether we might like it or not, it is everyone’s responsibility to ask the right questions.
It’s A Marathon, Not A Sprint
The path to a more ethical design practice might be complex and seem impossible depending on where you find yourself; however, we can always take steps in the right direction.
Suppose you’re looking for your first job opportunity or listening to new offers; consider doing more research about the company you are interested in. In that case, it is not only a good practice for interview processes but also a door to knowing their values and how they put them to practice if you have any concerns about how ethical something might sound, chances are that it is not ethical at all, however before you make a judgment do your share and ask during the interviews.
We can always bring ethical conversations to the table, share knowledge, and build those baselines within your team, so it can begin to reach the rest of the organization on a larger scale. Look for opportunities to voice your opinions regarding clients, customers, products, and/or services you might be working with. Do your research, but most importantly, bring solutions from a conscious and sustainable perspective.
If you feel there is no space in your workplace for these kinds of conversations, bring these topics to the attention of your leaders, and explain how adopting different paradigms, even smaller steps, can lead to a more significant change. Breaking cycles is complicated, and other interests might take precedence, but we should be able to move intentionally toward making a more ethical practice a reality.
Being an agent of change for ethical design is not supposed to be a trend or a phase; it is a constant and conscious choice in our professional path that will define us as designers.
