Over the past few years, as I’ve gotten to know more digital and design leaders at agencies and large organizations, I’ve learned how critical designers are in a company’s digital product, website, app and more. Designers are problem finders and solvers for an organization. They are challenged with determining what a digital product needs and what problems it will solve to better address and create that product. That requires a thorough understanding of the end user -- the people who will be using the product -- and more specifically, an understanding of what is good for them.
This is where ethical design comes in. And, designing for good and building responsible products couldn’t be discussed without Mariah Hay, VP of product at Help Scout and former head of practices for Pluralsight. Her Design Leadership Days speaker session on ethical design provides valuable lessons every design leader can utilize throughout their career. In case you missed it -- or are not yet a member of the Bureau of Digital -- we’ve got you covered. The following are four valuable lessons that design leaders can take away from this session.
Learn the ins & outs of the human using the product
From features to notification types, pop-ups to color schemes, design leaders must ensure their digital products are built with the customers’ needs and preferences in every key moment of the build. The following questions are starting points to help a design team create a great product:
Who is important in the customer’s life?
What makes the customer tick? What motivates them?
With what does the customer resonate, culturally?
Are we including all aspects of the customer here?
Is what we are building/designing humanizing the experience so the customer can relate to it and does it evoke a reaction?
Are we -- our team -- building something the customer can use?
A shop I was once part of pitched a cable company that wanted to develop a channel guide for its customers who were primarily 50 to 60 years old. Our team produced something simple and straightforward, but the client rejected it and chose another agency. The cable company was blown away by a rival pitch that used Flash, mesmerized by the gorgeous animations.
A few weeks later, the cable company called us back and said they were going with our design. It turned out that even though the splashy and beautiful guide was impressive, it was not functional for their audience. None of their customers could figure out how to use it. At the end of the day, the other team was clearly designing for themselves -- a group of young, savvy designers -- rather than the people who were going to be using the channel guide. Whose failure was this? The leader. This individual didn’t keep the team focused on the cable company’s customers.
Understand the vital role of ethics
To truly design for all -- and design for good -- it’s important to first have a general understanding of ethics. This ACM blog post from Ashley Carr is a fantastic resource that digs into the idea and foundations of ethical design.
Simply put: the unintended consequences of product design can be quite serious.
Mariah related this concept to a situation involving Pluralsight tech skills platform, which utilizes the Smarterer assessment engine. Designed to measure the skills of engineers and data scientists, the tool uses experts and crowd-sourced questions to assess a user’s talents with as few as 20 questions. The results can help the user focus on the skills and content they need to improve, rather than the areas in which they are already proficient. That can make the learning path more efficient and less intimidating.
Those who took the test were happy to learn more effectively and pleased to get an assessment they could use to showcase their skills. They didn’t mind sharing data because it had a direct value to them. But Pluralsight’s alarms went off when this client wanted to make the test mandatory and use it for hiring, firing and promotions. The bosses wanted to solve their problems by weaponizing the product Mariah’s team built. They knew the users -- the employees of the client -- wouldn’t go for that. Once a product poses more harm than benefit to users, nobody will want to use it.
To address the ethical conflicts, Mariah’s team came up with a solution that satisfied both the users and their employers while upholding Pluralsight’s own ethical standards. Pluralsight would share the user’s proficiency level but not the specific score. There would be enough data for learners to have conversations around professional development with their managers without showing data that employees feared would be leveraged against them.
Ensure the team is always designing with the human at the center of it all
The above experience underscored a critical point Mariah made in her session: if we always put the end user of the product’s needs and best interests at the center of what we are doing — which is the basis of empathy — we can avoid ethical problems.
Product designers must ensure a solution or experience doesn’t have a potential downstream negative impact or pose threats to society. Ethical principles can’t take a backseat to commercial priorities such as profit or speed-to-market. As Mariah stresses, in the long run, a company -- and design team -- will suffer if there are these kinds of tradeoffs.
Remember your responsibility as a design leader
There’s more than marketing success riding on the entire product design and build process. Mariah kept reminding us about how designers have one of the most powerful jobs in the world.
Think about it: the way a team designs a product can influence millions of people in minutes. With that kind of job comes huge responsibility. If we’re not careful, designers can become problem creators rather than problem solvers.
Interested in gaining access to an unparalleled community of support, and engaging in ongoing conversations and leadership training? Become a Bureau of Digital member today!