Evaluating Ethical Experience Design

The general goal of user experience design is to help users decide what they need next – whether it’s a particular resource to download, an answer to a burning question, or just a button to click. A UX designer helps users by making deliberate decisions about information or interactions to cut through the noise and say, “Hey! Here’s what you’re looking for!”

In making those decisions, though, we risk introducing bias. By analyzing a potential user pathway and determining what the most logical next step is, we can inherently foreclose other pathways a user may want to take, however “illogical” they may be. Ethical user experience requires us to find a sweet spot on a scale between complete and total user freedom (aka anarchy) and making all of a user’s decisions for them. To help find that balance, we ask ourselves the following questions.

Does this help users, or does this help us?

Good user experience results in users making the best possible decisions, right? Not necessarily. Users, like all humans, sometimes don’t make the best choices for themselves. While we might know that a user can receive the maximum benefit from filtering a list a certain way or subscribing to a newsletter, we know they may not necessarily be looking to do so. If we over-prioritize particular choices in favor of moving the needle on our goals, we might find that we’ve limited a user’s ability to use and understand a product. Ethical user experience design means that in a conflict of interests between us, our goals, and our users, the users always win.

Are we designing with respect?

A good design should respect a user’s time, privacy, and agency. Decisions should be quick, disclosure should be optional, and pathways should be unrestricted. However, when push comes to shove, even small decisions can impede our ability to respect these three considerations. For example, imagine you’re designing a process through which a user registers for an account. By not providing them with a progress indicator that shows the total number of steps required to register, you’re not helping a user understand how much longer the process will take, thereby not respecting their time.

Are we following the best practices for digital consent?

Respecting user consent is an important part of ethical UX design. The Consentful Tech Project defines good digital consent around the FRIES model – freely given, reversible, informed, enthusiastic, and specific. I could write at least another newsletter article on designing for consent, but in short, designs should give context around every action a user can take, provide pathways for undoing those actions, let a user choose to take those actions, and help users understand the consequences of those actions. Even small decisions can impact consent. Consider, for instance, a checkbox on an event registration form that, when ticked, signs a user up for a mailing list for future events. While it may stand to reason that a user registering for an event may also be interested in future events, good consent means not having this box checked by default. We need to allow a user to specifically decide to check the additional checkbox and not make that assumption for them.

Ultimately, a responsible and ethical UX designer recognizes that every individual is, in some way, biased and that, ultimately, it’s our responsibility to ensure that we’re taking action to mitigate those biases and design a clear, usable, and respectful experience. While these are a handful of the questions we can use to check ourselves, the best way forward is to ensure we’re able to collect requirements, perspectives, and feedback from users through research and testing. While those methods might not always be possible, you can always put yourself in your users’ shoes and follow the golden rule: would I feel good about using this?