Ethics and Responsible Design

What does it mean to be responsible designers?

As the world is embracing newer technologies, the roles and responsibilities of UX designers are evolving day by day. For UX design studios, these changes have brought unintended challenges along. A lot of these challenges are ethical. Our interactions and dependency on these technologies, emphasize the importance of these challenges.

Ethics.

Ethics in user experience design exist from offering freedom to users to designing with the intent of limiting the user to prevent errors and making crucial decisions for the users. UX design as a profession faces challenges like privacy issues that crop up on social media, self-driving cars that have automated safety features, etc. Our brain craves new information and those pull-to-refresh are way too satisfying.

Ethical challenges often arise while planning and creating the initial wireframes, and particular ethical difficulties continue to rise during the product planning stage. It is advisable to conduct properly to avoid negative public opinion and trust pitfalls in the future. How do we take into consideration our differences from one another, and start to design for a more diverse range of people?

Responsible Design.

Inclusive and responsible design has featured among 2019’s UX trends predominantly. Let us explore as UX design professionals, what does it mean to be responsible designers?

• Challenges in today’s attention economy. While technology has undoubtedly made us more productive and augmented our natural abilities, technology has also enabled us to blur lines between work and the rest of life, and also between our public and private lives.
• Design delivering frustrating experiences proves to be financially detrimental to businesses. It is essential to understand the responsibility of design in terms of business returns. Design has the power to affect the finances, customer decisions and the future of businesses.

Here’s a proposed practice to encourage designing for humanity, ecology, and human values.

1. Develop a Value System. Integrity.
2. Walk the Talk. Design Activism.
3. Speak Less, Demonstrate More.
4. Be Honest to Yourself. Be Extremely Sensitive towards the Impact of Design. Empathy and awareness.