Have you ever stopped to think about the ethical implications of your designs, or if they meet certain acceptable standards? It’s easy to forget about subtle moral considerations when chasing job and business-related goals. But these subtle moral considerations are essential to the consumers who will use your product or service. They affect the user’s experience with your design and can influence the credibility of your brand.
Often, you’ll know if your work is lacking certain ethical elements through user feedback. However, waiting until users give feedback before implementing ethical design principles is not a great idea. You’ll probably leave many users with the wrong first impression of your design. You can avoid displeasing users by implementing critical ethical principles to your designs from the get-go.
Achieving that starts with a detailed understanding of ethical design principles—what ethical design principles mean, and how they work in practice. Here’s all you need to know.
What are Ethical Design Principles?
Ethics is a term indicating acceptability according to predetermined moral standards. Ethics comprise moral principles that guide what we should do. In most instances, failing to meet preset ethics standards won’t attract any form of punishment. However, without these standards, there’s a tendency for people to take advantage of each other without restrictions.
Bringing ethics into design and work, we can define ethics as a set of moral standards that guides the quality of the product or service on offer. The concept of ethical design principles applies majorly to businesses that offer SaaS (software as a service) products. In fact, the SaaS definition is a perfect case study for learning all there is to ethical design principles.
Companies in the SaaS industry only face a few regulations to guide their activities. Therefore, these companies use ethical principles as a compass that guides their online activities.
The subject of ethics and morals can be quite vague, with many undefined areas, so ethical design principles exist to highlight the areas of focus for SaaS companies. They include:
Product/Service Usability
By usability, we’re not only referring to the literal uses of a product. Neither does usability in ethics refer to the benefits the product offers the users. Without a doubt, a product will be meaningless if it’s not usable. However, usability, in ethical design, is what we’ll term inclusive usability. Inclusive usability implies that you design your product to provide equal satisfaction levels to all users, regardless of the users’ uniqueness.
Accessibility
You likely have a target market comprising people with access to your designs, and you’re working hard to have them do business with you. What about people who need the service you offer but for specific reasons can’t access it?
Is your product accessible to everyone who needs it, or only a few who meet specific requirements? It’s unethical to be insensitive to the needs of people who need you but can’t get to you. Accessibility, as an ethical design principle, speaks to going out of your way to make your service offerings accessible to this demographic.
Take a look at Bay Alarm Medical for example. They offer products that are simple and easy to use and a 24/7 hotline in case an emergency happens. The business model thought about not only their end users, but the family as a whole. And if all isn’t up to standard, they have a 30-day risk free trial.
Privacy
Privacy is the most-discussed ethical principle. Most digital setups now have privacy policies explaining how they use private user information. The emphasis your client base will place on their privacy shows just how important it is to them. Nobody wants to work with organizations that won’t keep their private information confidential.
User/Customer and Employer Involvement
As an SaaS company, your work will be towards satisfying particular human needs. Keeping whoever you’re working for in the loop through user involvement helps you satisfy them better. For instance, say you’re designing a web based application: Involving the client in the process enables them to make corrections as the work progresses. After completing the project, there’ll be lower chances of the user complaining about your work.
Ways to Apply Ethical Design Principles at Work
The ethical design principles are easy to understand, but applying them may be somewhat challenging. You may be wondering how you’ll manage to implement all these principles in a digital setup. Or perhaps you just think it’ll be challenging to follow these principles while focusing on your goals. The following practices will reflect the implementation of ethical principles in your designs.
Practice Honesty
Honesty is a key characteristic in business, work, and day-to-day relationships with others. An upfront attitude is also a critical factor in ethics and moral culture. It sets the tone for the kind of work culture you’ll adopt and fosters consistency in results. Honesty also sets the foundation for authenticity, transparency, and trust. It’s important for your business—over 80% of customers value authenticity in brands.
Exercising honesty involves all the little things that we sometimes don’t hold in high regard. Refusing to mislead customers, subordinates, or superiors by lying or telling partial truths is a show of honesty.
If you’re honest, it becomes easier to notice if you’re violating any of the principles of ethical design. Honesty will also compel you to make amends when you err.
Establish Workplace Ethics Guidelines
Honesty sets the tone of workplace culture. However, setting the tone may not be enough. It’s better to outline workplace ethical guidelines that you and your colleagues have to follow strictly.
It’s not enough to say to yourself and colleagues: “Let’s implement ethical design principles.” You need guidelines to go along with this conviction. These ethical guidelines will foster accountability and make it easy to evaluate the moral values of team members.
Ethical guidelines are typically a mix of company moral values with considerations for the end-users. The guidelines will include activities that promote the ethical principles and values of the organization.
If you work alone, these guidelines will consist mainly of your moral values—reminding you of the values you have to uphold to do your work in the best way possible.
Be Open-Minded
Having an open mind means being receptive to different opinions and ideas from different sources. An open mind is always ready to receive and evaluate other people’s opinions without bias. Open-mindedness will enable you to see the importance of ethical principles and be receptive to ideas on how to implement them.
It also gives you an unbiased outlook which makes receiving, evaluating, and acting on feedback easier. Note that being open-minded doesn’t mean other opinions can sway you easily.
It simply means you’re willing to consider the opinion of others and work with them. It’s also a plus to your work. When you listen to others, you’ll get a new perspective that can help you create great content and designs.
Embrace Diversity in Your Designs
Many times, without realizing it, you may be portraying racial, gender, and other types of bias in your designs. It’s not because you intend to, but your designs reflect your thoughts, culture, and social values. However, regardless of whether it’s intentional or not, it’s unethical when your designs reflect such biases. Such reflections portray the absence of important ethical design principles.
The best way to avoid bias in your design is to embrace diversity and inclusion culture. Using inclusive language displays a respect for the diversity of perspectives and backgrounds that individuals contribute to conversations and gives everybody an equal opportunity to share their thoughts. Embracing diversity includes updating your social values and mindset to accept others with their uniqueness. When you truly accept others, your designs will become more inclusive and usable for more people. This way, you’ll be implementing major ethical design principles of usability and accessibility.
Prioritize User Privacy
With the rapid growth of the digital space and more users now migrating to the cloud, privacy is a major issue. Many designers now sell private data to the highest bidders. Personal information is no longer private as many big companies now have access to info that should be confidential. These acts are highly unethical and a breach of user trust.
But you can play your part in solving the problem of private information mismanagement. Be transparent in your dealings.
Use people’s private data appropriately, i.e., for only the purposes you collected them. If you store personal user data in a CMP, use it to improve user experience and user satisfaction. What is CMP? CMP optimizes, automates, and orchestrates resources on a cloud setup.
Beware of Assumptions
While providing a service, there’s the tendency to make assumptions on the end user’s behalf. Assumptions are not exactly a bad concept. But what happens when you make the wrong assumption? It can result in consequences for users and negatively affect their experience. Negative assumptions are unethical, and you should avoid them at all times.
By keeping track of assumptions, you’ll be more aware of the limitations of your design. Then, you can honestly focus efforts on eliminating the limitations of your design. And instead of assuming for the users, you can involve them in the process by getting their preferences and opinions. You’ll be able to satisfy user expectations better when you involve them in your design process.
Ethical Principles Make Your Designs More User-Centric
When you fail to implement basic ethical principles in your design, it implies your brand cares little about the users. Ensure to conform with ethical design principles by making your work more accessible, usable, and engaging. Top it off with total user privacy, and you’re good to go.
