Towards confronting the ethics of user experience.
Then Peter Merholz flipped the card table on the way that user experience disciplines fit into ad agencies, and the card table landed on a powder keg, and the keg exploded, only the keg-table assembly was also in a cute hamster factory, where the hamsters are made, killing all the hamsters inside and now we can’t have nice things anymore. Partly, I suppose, because now we have this giant us v. them mentality going on: UX people at ad agencies feel miffed, UX people not at ad agencies are fist pumping, and I (someone who has worked at ad agencies and not ad agencies in the past) feel weirdly shrifted by the entire thing, stuck trying to defend one mentality to another mentality, and yet preferring only one of those mentalities if you put a gun to my head and made me choose.
I think it’s a problem to open rifts in any discipline where ultimately the same design decisions are coming from the same places of empathy and consideration. The only difference is that I’ve found you have to fight a lot harder to get those considered as valid when you’re in an ad agency. Not that that’s bad, of course: it just means you need to put on brass knuckles from day zero, because you have to work to effect really significant institutional change. But I don’t want to start seeing any situations where someone directed the UX practice and just killed it at an ad agency, and they get black-balled from practicing the same at an interactive firm, or a UX firm, or wherever. Then the rift widens, and it’s more difficult to reconcile. And people my age then have to worry whether they’re being pigeonholed as an ad-centric UX designer, and oh god will they be screwed because all they really wanted to do in their lives was work at (e.g.) IDEO. Or are they really practicing user experience at all, etc.
Fighting in this particular way can only be resolved if we all try to heal the rift, and we can only heal the rift if we start to put our heads down and soberly ask really big questions about what we do.
Headbutting this problem directly in the sternum
I spent two years writing my book in part because I believe that non-IxD types make IxD decisions, usually unwittingly, all the time in their jobs. I want to go a step further and assert that most IxD decisions are in fact ethical decisions – in fact, technology in general is an ethical decision, one that we all too rarely confront, on every side of the table, in every agency, on every team, in every company, ever. Jacques Ellul knew this, in his book Propaganda:
But I think that propaganda fills a need of modern man, a need that creates in him an unconscious desire for propaganda. He is in the position of needing outside help to be able to face his condition. And that aid is propaganda. Naturally, he does not say: “I want propaganda.” On the contrary, in line with preconceived notions, he abhors propaganda, and considers himself a “free and mature” person. But in reality he calls for and desires propaganda that will permit him to ward off certain attacks and reduce certain tensions.
Replace every instance of “propaganda” with “technology,” and you can figure out what I’m getting at here. So I think this is tremendously important, yet few people are asking these questions, possibly because they’re big and scary and may result in significant reductions in the size of our paychecks.
To our defense, we have made some admirable attempts to codify the ethics of UX. Design Activism is currently devoting some space to ethics in every end of design. Dark Patterns is a nice collection of misleading and unethical practices. And last year, Whitney Hess attacked the problem by revising the Hippocratic Oath for UX designers. Even with all this, gaps remain.
I believe that solidifying and continually revising ethical guidelines is a good step towards finding consensus and healing these rifts. Moreover, it’ll be good ammo when we try to pitch precisely what it is we do in the broader design process, and a good defense to hold up when unethical decisions are proposed.
So let’s stop bitching at each other and try to figure this out. I’ve been researching this for the past week, and in a few days I’m going to write up some initial findings. I’m tired of seeing everybody taking potshots at one another, because it doesn’t actually do anything. I am very much listening, and would love if you sent me email or talked at me on Twitter. These are big, big questions, and there’s no way that I’m answering them alone.
