Ethics in Design
You’re a hired gun, not a tool. Don’t fall into the wrong hands.
This was written in response to an ”Ethics in Your Industry“ prompt in 2007. Obviously my thoughts on the subject are constantly evolving along with the industry. Thanks to Amy Sue Kim for the graphic header.
Introduction
It used to be that people would blame themselves when they couldn’t figure out how to use something. The classic example is programming a VCR. It would frustrate people causing them to give up using the features they had paid for. However, with the rise of the savvy consumer, people have rightfully started blaming the companies that market these poorly designed products. Design is very broad in that it’s the process of creating order from chaos. It’s about making things more useful, easier to use, more efficient, or simply more pleasurable. By its nature, it tends to be used commercially because it is a powerful tool in making a message communicate more effectively or making products more compelling. Note that the emphasis is always on making something better for those that actually use the end product. However, a quandary becomes evident when a client asks a designer to do something that helps the client but is detrimental to the end user of a product. The most extreme cases of this might be the system designed by IBM to track prisoners in Nazi concentration camps,1 or creating advertising for cigarette companies. As history demonstrates, in both these cases, someone is willing to do the job if enough money is put forward. An ethical designer, however, bears the responsibility of the design’s consequences. Blindly obeying a client ignores the role of the designer as an expert adviser, and goes against the spirit of making products and processes better than they currently are.
What Does Good Design Stand For?
When discussing design, aesthetics is often the first thing to come to mind. It’s scientifically proven that pretty things work better. At least they are perceived to work better.2 Good design is more than skin deep though. Pleasing aesthetics is just one tool in creating products that provide value to those that use them. It is actually how a product functions that designers should be concerned with first and foremost.
Designing function includes product features, but also takes into consideration what the product is supposed to accomplish in a certain context. Doors in a home don’t have labels saying push or pull because the same individuals use the doors day in day out. They would eventually learn how the doors function based on experience, and the labels would become an unnecessary eyesore after a few days. However, glass doors at a mall entrance have thousands of individuals each using the doors infrequently. Labels or another method, such as having a push plate or handle, make the door more functional for the person using it. This may seem basic, but simple design decisions can have dramatic impacts. Even the biggest companies sometimes stumble in their efforts to set themselves apart.
Usability expert Donald Norman provides a classic example of how the Boston Hilton’s entrance is a row of glass doors with hidden hinges and horizontal handlebars that are nearly centered on each door. The effect is a minimalist, elegant wall of glass with floating bars. But guests sometimes have trouble figuring out which side of the doors they should push or pull on.3 If the designer had placed the handlebars closer to the edge to be pushed, operating the door would be more obvious. In this case, the designer bears the responsibly for the poor design. The perception is that the guests’ priorities were placed lower than the hotel’s image. Poor design affects the reputations of both the client and the designer even if the client approves each decision. This is why working to satisfy only the client without fully considering the end user is unethical design. It ignores the most important party in the dialogue between client and consumer that the designer is assigned to mediate. A designer not only acts as an agent of the client, but must also be the end-user’s advocate. It is the role of the designer to take client objectives and develop a solution that accomplishes those goals while seamlessly creating a solution that satisfies the end-user.
Responsility to the Client
How can the designer be held responsible if the client is approving everything? It’s true that the client is historically the one deciding what functions something will have, because they assume the financial risk of failures.4 But a designer isn’t a mindless agent producing a product from a blueprint. There may be specifications, but the designer is the one drawing the blueprint. This is where the designer’s role as an expert advisor comes into play. Hopefully, the client hired the designer because of his expertise in understanding how a particular medium functions. It is assumed that he has a body of knowledge that is deeper than the client’s in a particular area. It wouldn’t make sense for the client to seek the designer’s services otherwise. Thus the ethical burden is placed on the designer because the client does not have the expertise that the designer does. The client can plead ignorance but the designer cannot.
For example, in web design, the body of knowledge a designer possesses can span as wide as visual language, information architecture, interaction design, marketing, and coding. The web designer might not be an authority in all of these fields, but should know enough to have an understanding of how they work together. When a client asks to implement checkboxes on an e-commerce site so that visitors can opt-in to newsletters, that is a legitimate request. It allows for the company to create a dialogue with its customers. However, if the client wants that box to be checked by default, it creates an ethical dilemma. Doing so would only require two words to be added to the code. The technical simplicity, however, hides the underlying complexity. From a marketing standpoint, having it checked by default would be great, since it results in more people signing up. However, from a usability perspective it is bad according to the Nielsen Norman Group’s User Experience Report.5 Signing up for something shouldn’t be default behavior because the user can easily overlook it, or become annoyed at having to uncheck it. It’s also deceptive. Just as an ethical lawyer should discourage illegal courses of action to clients, it is the professional responsibility of a designer to advise against doing something that would be detrimental to end users, and potentially to the client, even if the client asks for it. Following through on unethical design orders will only end up hurting the client in the long run as customers get angry and frustrated. After all is said and done, the end-user is still who determines the success of any business.
Responsibility to the End-User
Good design seeks to foster the user’s trust, then fulfills or exceeds her expectations. This can only happen when the user is the main priority in the design process. The hotel entrance and checkbox scenarios above are examples of how design decisions can lead to frustration and distrust from users if things don’t work as expected. When someone sees a movie poster with colorful cartoon characters, she shouldn’t be shocked with a horror film when she goes to the theatre with kids in tow. Apple, as a design-centric company, understands this. At the Goldman Sachs Technology Investment Symposium, COO Tim Cook said, “We realized that people really want a video camera built into the system. So in every Mac…there’s a camera built in...that takes down our peripheral revenue, but we give the customer what they want.” 6 This strategy of designing for the end user’s needs and wants develops into a loyalty that will continue to grow so long as trust and expectations aren’t violated. End-users will pay a premium if their need and wants are satisfied. Clients might not always recognize this while chasing short-term results. It is up to the designer to advocate for a better design while striving to make the best product they can for the end-user.
Clearly, this wasn’t the case in the 2000 Presidential Elections with the butterfly ballot fiasco. The system was designed by amateurs who didn’t test it.7 Saving a little bit of money for the client, the US Government, was more important than voter accuracy. Instead, it ended up costing far more in the long run with all the recounts. This could have been avoided if the emphasis had been on designing a voting system for voters that are “inefficient users…fallible users…people who are tired and stressed, cranky and irritable, sloppy and inattentive. In other words, design for real people.” 7 Considering the end-user is key to ethical design. This doesn’t mean that balancing research and production costs for the client are not important. The point is that if the end-user isn’t more important than the other two, the design solution is set up to fail. A designer’s responsibility to the end-user is to make something more useful or to refuse to make it at all. There are cases where the client will not have the end-user’s well being in mind. No design solution can reconcile that ethical position because it is doomed from the start if the client asks for something unethical. It is the designer’s responsibility to refuse the job in this situation. Taking that work will only end up in wasting natural and mental resources. The worst-case scenario is that it ends up hurting the user, which is the complete opposite of good, ethical design.
Responsibility to Society
Most discussion of ethical design (if mentioned at all) usually revolves around using environmentally sustainable materials, or doing a communications campaign for a non-profit group. Rarely is the relationship between designer, client, and end user questioned. Yet it’s something that nearly every designer is faced with on a daily basis. It’s easy to refuse a client when much of society denounces it, as in the case of Big Tobacco. It’s a lot harder to advocate against a client’s marketing plans when most of the people that end up consuming the product will probably never come back to complain. We pick and choose our battles, but if we retreat from every fight we’ll eventually have nothing left of a professional soul. Erring on the side of the users over the client might cost you your job, but at least your integrity as a designer will be intact. This isn’t an issue of legal liability, but rather an ethical issue of creating the kind of world we want to live in. After all, we are all end-users of products that someone else is designing.
- Saffer, Dan. Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices. Berkeley, CA: New Riders 2007.
- Lidwell, William, Kritina Holden, and Jill Butler. Universal Principles of Design. Glouster, MA: Rockport 2003.
- Norman, Donald. The Design of Everyday Things. Jackson, TN: Basic Books 2002.
- Krippendorff, Klaus. The Semantic Turn: A New Foundation for Design. London: Taylor & Francis 2006.
- Nielsen, Jakob. “Checkboxes vs. Radio Buttons.” Useit.com Alertbox. 27 Sep 2004. 7 Mar 2007. <http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040927.html>.
- Cook, Tim. Apple Presentation. Goldman Sachs Technology Investment Symposium. The Venetian, Las Vegas, NV. 27 Feb 2007.
- Heller, Steven. “Usability Expert: Steven Heller Interviews Don Norman.” Citizen Designer: Perspectives on Design Responsibility. Eds. Steven Heller and Véronique Vienne. New York: Allworth Press, 2003. 128-133.
- Szenasy, Susan S. “Ethical Design Education: Confessions of a Sixties Idealist.” Citizen Designer: Perspectives on Design Responsibility. Eds. Steven Heller and Véronique Vienne. New York: Allworth Press, 2003. 20-24.
Ethics in Design by Daniel Yang is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.