As a UX are you acting ethically?

What exactly is ethical when it comes to Experience Design?

It’s not as simple a question as you might think, UX has no globally agreed ethical rules. Hell it doesn’t have a globally agreed definition, so rules are pretty hard to come by. Throw in a healthy mix of politics, cultural differences and influences and you start getting into the philosophy of the nature of truth and questions around the arbitrary nature of morality.

Let’s avoid that detour, shall we?

Most people reading this will probably have two masters, the one who pays you (employers) and the ones who don't (end users) and on the whole you, like every other employee, are governed by your employer’s ethical guidelines rather than your own or your users.

The problem with that is that there is a huge amount of organisations for whom ethics is a PR exercise, something akin to a Mission Statements, written and published by somebody who might honestly, passionately, believe in the statement but once published is never checked, never held up as a core value, certainly not a disciplinary offense if broken, probably never adhered to on a day-to-day basis and easily compromised in favour of ease of working practices if a deadline is approaching.

That’s not all organisations, I hasten to add, not by a long shot, but there's enough to be noticeable, and usually they’re those places that look at end users or customers as a resource to be exploited for quick profit, rather than an asset to be understood, nurtured and grown for sustainable success. You know the sort of places, we all do, they’re the ones that throw money at UX but at the the UI side of things rather than the process side of things and are happy as long as you can ‘do UX’ without disrupting anything else.

Where are the user considerations in that scenario, never mind ethics?

Now, as a practitioner, you may find yourself working for one of these places. I’m not going to condemn you, if I'm honest we all compromise for business expediency, after all those bills won’t pay themselves, and we all choose the line at which we can or can’t look at ourselves in the mirror. If it's really bad you can tell yourself that you’re mitigating the worst excesses of bad business to improve UX slowly, and that actually may well be true, but is it enough? Is that really what you signed-up for when you became a UX, though? Could you really stand in front of an end user and tell them proudly of all the UCD problems you’ve ignored to make the business happy, with a clear conscious?

Where do you personally stand ethically when it comes to compromising user experience?

The ethics of Psychology

Luckily we have a proven working model when it comes to psychological studies - and I think we can all agree, psychology is the very foundation of UX - there are generally six rules that ensure that psychologists running studies have the same ethical standards, no matter where they are or who they're doing the study for. In essence they are:

1. Informed Consent

That’s not just getting a participant in a study to agree to take part, it’s ensuring that they have enough knowledge of what they’re agreeing to before they say yes or no.

2. Debrief

The purpose of a debrief is to remove any misconceptions and anxieties arising from the study. It’s the sibling of Informed Consent but at the conclusion of the process rather than the start. The participant must be able to challenge why they’ve been asked to do something and told explicitly what has been done and why it was done in the way it was.

3. Protection of Participants

The participant must not be exposed to risks greater than those in their normal lives, is the general rule of thumb.

4. Deception

Don’t mislead, misinform or obscure the aims of the study when communicating with the participant.

5. Confidentiality

Participants, and the data gained from them, must be kept anonymous unless they have given their full Informed Consent otherwise.

6. Withdrawal

Participants should be able to leave the program/study at any time and be allowed to withdraw their data from the study when they do so.

Pretty straightforward, yes? Not a lot to argue with when it comes to ethical behaviour when dealing with another human’s mind. There probably isn't a User Researcher out there who would disagree (well maybe with my definitions but not with the rules). So, if psychology is indeed the foundation of UX can we translate those rules into an ethical UX framework that works for solution design as well as it does user research?

The ethics of UX

Let’s rephrase those six rules slightly, let’s make them more about the user than the process and let’s frame them in commercial terms rather than study terms.

1. Informed Consent

If you’re sending somebody on a user journey that has little or no benefit to them and you haven’t told them why or asked them if they want to do it and told them what the consequences will be if they do or don’t, you’re not acting ethically.

2. Debrief Continuously Inform

Tell the user what they’ve accomplished, what happens next and give them the chance – wherever possible – to undo it or at least change it.

3. Protection of Participants Users and their data

If what you’re doing has a risk to the end user be it financial, emotional or physical and you’re knowingly doing it or just haven’t warned them and given them the chance to say no, you’re not acting ethically.

 If you’re leaving out Accessibility compliance, because it’s expensive or hard to do (nonsense if you build it in from the start) so making life difficult for users, then you’re not acting ethically.

If you’re installing software or even just browser cookies without consent and making it difficult to manage them, you’re not acting ethically.

If you’re empowering communications but not controlling abuse, criminal activity and deliberate misinformation campaigns, or not even responding to complaints about it consistently and rapidly (yes I’m looking at you Twitter and Facebook) then you’re not acting ethically. Before anyone starts, abuse and lies do not fall under freedom of speech, see libel, slander and criminal intent laws for details.

If you’re doing anything that exploits the user rather than protects them, no matter what the business benefit, you’re not only acting unethically you’re not a UX. The door is over there.

4. Deception Honesty

Adding in a Dark Pattern? Making it impossible or just difficult to turn off a feature or video the business wants to have seen? Playing up the benefits of a product or service and not being open about the risks? Not divulging what data you're collecting and what you're going to do with it? You wouldn’t want it happening to you, why do it to anybody else? Honesty is surely about as universal an ethical trait as we can get.

5. Confidentiality

Users, and the data gained from them, must be kept anonymous unless they have given their full Informed Consent to do otherwise. How is this difficult to understand? Yet I’ve lost count of the number of horror stories I’ve heard where orgs want to ‘harvest personal data’ for direct marketing or worse monetise it to third-parties without telling the user. Data is big business and when used legitimately of incredible value not just monetarily but in making informed business decisions and improving user experience, but there is a reason why GDPR exists and confidentially, plain simple fostering trust, should not be ignored in favour of business expediency.

6. Withdrawal

Users should be able to leave the process or system and delete their accounts including all their personal and account data at any time. If you’re only allowing them to do that if they agree to the business holding on to the data ‘for your records’ and don’t have a legal reason with a user benefit to do so, that’s not ethical no matter how much you tell yourself otherwise.

Pretty straightforward, yes? Not even that detailed or complicated, yet so many of us and the places we work for fail to keep to them.

Where am I going with this?

There’s a lot of discussion about what UX is or isn’t, about where it’s going and even if it needs to be replaced completely in favour of a more refined Human Centred Design definition, like that championed by Don Norman that – and I’m paraphrasing here – means we need to get beyond the idea of customer or user as discrete entities and see the bigger, more human, influences that we all have on a global scale.

I have some doubts that anything that has the term design within the digital space will ever mean anything other than UI to some businesses, but I do agree with the argument of expanding and reframing the concept of what we do to match a world changed by COVID, Climate Change, IoT, and the drive for sustainability.

If we’re to do that, or even if we’re just to continue with the same approach we have now, I’d argue that we need to first establish the ethical foundations we personally are going to work to. As I said earlier there aren't any global rules, no governing body to set them, so we need to set the boundaries ourselves and not leave them up to the employer we work for.

For me, personally, those foundations should be as close as possible to the psychology ones we already adhere to in research. If we do that we can succeed for ourselves, our business, our discipline and for the people we’re trying to help.

May be that’s the final ethical rule we need, if you’re working for a place that doesn’t allow you to approach your work ethically, perhaps, just perhaps, you need to stop working there and go to some place that will.