Photo by Hayden Walker on Unsplash

Ethical Design — A Road Paved with Good Intentions

Chris Kiess
Prototypr
Published in
10 min readMay 21, 2019

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As designers, our hearts are often in the right place. We have good intentions, resist dark patterns, and place our users first. But often, our designs bear latent ethical issues. These issues arise either because of existing design processes in organizations or because we have difficulty foreseeing how the product will be consumed and used in real-world scenarios.

This is the second of a two-part article. The first part of this article was devoted to exploring existential values and ethical issues where ill or misdirected intent occur. In this article, we will identify and examine ethical issues (with special reference to the healthcare industry) where our intent, though benevolent, results in latent ethical problems.

The following ethical issues are often not evident during the design or development phase. Sometimes they are even not evident to designers well after the release, which underscores the importance of developing and maintaining an ethical awareness of both their existence and potential consequence.

Decision Aids and Making Choices for Our Users

We build menus, radio button selections, and often automate choices for our users in designs. Hick’s Law would have us attempt to minimize long lists of choices for our users. We often use onboarding or wizard patterns to solve such dilemmas. We use automation when we choose defaults for our users. And there may be instances in which we want to slow our users down when making decisions, as this aids in preventing errors. There are a number of ethical issues surrounding decision aids.

As always, the user’s best interest must be a top priority. Having a checkbox checked by default — which signs users up for a newsletter — places business needs before user desires. When we use onboarding patterns that ask limited questions upfront and then make a series of choices for the user, are we making the right choices? Are we transparent with those choices?

Curating content is another place where we make decisions for our users. We often tailor content to help our users more easily locate an item. But this comes at a cost. As the famous philosopher Jacques Derrida noted, “Inclusion can only be achieved through exclusion.” How do we know…

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Healthcare User Experience Designer in the Greater Chicago area