The transcription of Cennydd Bowles’s talk on ethics in technology at SustainableUX 2019 is absolute gold and a must-read:

It’s a mistake to separate technical capabilities from human capabilities. These things act together. They become interwoven, hybridized actors. Things change what people can do and how they do it. It is true to an extent that old sage that guns don’t kill people; people do. But a gunman, the hybrid actor of a human and a technology coming together, sure as hell can.

So we have to abandon this belief that the things we build are just neutral tools. We have to recognize therefore that we can’t wash our hands of the social, ethical and political consequences of our work. This can be a tough sell to some. Technology and algorithms and then the bedrock of it all, data, are often seen as clean, objective, neutral things.

He gives lots of practical advice on how to make ethical thinking part of our work — including viewing ethics as just another design constraint, like any other. And for a more… uh… “incendiary” approach to this topic, also see Mike Monteiro’s We Built A Broken Internet. Now We Need To Burn It To The Ground.

I’m staying out of the “hot takes on that John Maeda interview” genre, but I do want to link to Heather Phillips’s Stop dwelling on being design-led: Focus on the user. She brings up some great points that product managers need to keep in mind as well:

We shouldn’t think about being design-first, or development-first. Instead, we should be thinking about how we can bring our paths closer together. Every business function — including design — should be thinking about the user, first and foremost. And building solutions with the best user experience in mind. This work should not be silo’d in product, marketing, or design.

We’re in this together.

Amen to that.

I talked about adding friction to products last week, and Kurt Yalcin’s article Against Engagement makes for a great companion piece. He touches on many topics, but I especially appreciate his views on that topic:

Slowing experiences down with intention and adding deliberate requests for user action at critical moments in a user flow makes for better experiences in the long run. Bring a level of consciousness to your designs and address the pressures you may have to reduce friction at all costs. If adding an additional click means giving users more freedom, go with the extra clicks. This level of awareness in your design enables users to make conscious choices about when, where and how to engage with your products, rather than acting on autopilot.

In The Value of Inconvenient Design Jesse Weaver discusses the role of user friction in design — the things that slow us down from getting a task done — and how the goal is not to remove all friction from our product flows:

The friction of the checkout process provides a check against impulse purchases and overspending. In a world where many people struggle to manage their money, these small barriers can be critical to maintaining financial balance. While the market would dictate that it’s not Amazon’s job to help its customers control their spending, lowering the barrier to impulse purchases could have a net negative effect on the value people get from Amazon’s service. The Dash button, for example, eliminates so much friction that customers may not even know how much they’re spending until after they’ve completed a purchase. In light of this, Amazon Dash was recently deemed illegal in Germany for violating consumer protection laws.

If you’re interested in the topic of “frictionless design”, here is some related reading. Clive Thompson digs into software that aims to add friction to our lives in his Wired essay We Need Software to Help Us Slow Down, Not Speed Up:

It’s certainly possible to slow our software, and thereby ourselves. But it’ll happen only when we become too unsettled by the speed of our journey.

Here is Chris Palmieri in A Practice of Ethics:

But some friction is borne of respect, when we present information about the choices available to users and help them make better decisions. An emailed invoice could remind a customer they were paying for a service they no longer use. A checkbox could assure a user of their current content privacy settings before posting a sensitive photo. Recognition of a past purchase can save a customer the hassle of having to return a book they already have, or confirm that they are re-buying exactly the same shampoo.

And Andrew Grimes in Meta-Moments: Thoughtfulness by Design:

Meta-moments can provide us with space to interpret, understand, and add meaning to our experiences. A little friction in our flow is all we need. A roadblock must be overcome. A speed bump must be negotiated. A diversion must be navigated. Each of these cases involves our attention in a thoughtful way. Our level of engagement deepens. We have an experience we can remember.

In short, not all friction is bad…

Related to the podcast discussion I shared the other day, Andy J. Ko wrote a really good essay called The problem with “learnability” in human-computer interaction. He argues that most software is learned socially, not independently:

We just have to think about our own personal experiences to see that nearly everyone learns how to use all but the simplest software socially, not in isolation. Our friends and family introduce us to new software and teach us how to use it. Our parents call us and ask for help troubleshooting software behavior they don’t understand. Our children teach us about new apps.

He then goes on to ask what it would look like if we designed software for this kind of social learning:

What would it mean to design for teachability rather than learnability? It might mean supporting the creation of not just one tutorial, but a myriad of tutorials, each supporting learners with different prior knowledge and interests. It might mean software companies having their app’s splash screens start with the question, “How do you want to learn this app?” rather than dropping users to a home screen and giving them a few tooltips. It might mean designing software to have teacher modes, where someone could go through and annotate key parts of the interface for someone they are teaching how to use an application (e.g., “Dad, remember to always click this box this before you submit!”).

These are good questions to think about as we work on product onboarding strategies.

Very interesting article by Anab Jain arguing for More than Human-Centered Design. We need to move beyond ourselves and consider the things around us:

Interdependence is a powerful concept for me: different participants—human and non-human—are emotionally, economically, ecologically or morally interdependent on each other. And this reliance is acknowledged. I think this perspective is something that would be very meaningful for many of us to consider—whether we’re interaction, service, or UX designers, entrepreneurs, researchers or people who put things out in the world for others “to use”.

Have a look at the article for further thoughts and some practical examples.

A lot of words are being written about AI and machine learning these days, so it’s sometimes hard to know what to pay attention to. M.C. Elish and danah boyd’s Don’t Believe Every AI You See is one of those essays that I would consider essential reading on the topic. On the ethics of artificial intelligence:

When we consider the ethical dimensions of AI deployments, in nearly every instance the imagined capacity of a technology does not match up with current reality. As a result, public conversations about ethics and AI often focus on hypothetical extremes, like whether or not an AI system might kill someone, rather than current ethical dilemmas that need to be faced here and now. The real questions of AI ethics sit in the mundane rather than the spectacular. They emerge at the intersections between a technology and the social context of everyday life, including how small decisions in the design and implementation of AI can create ripple effects with unintended consequences.

And on the supposed “neutrality” of machines:

[There is] a prevailing rhetoric around AI and machine learning, which presents artificial intelligence as the apex of efficiency, insight, and disinterested analysis. And yet, AI is not, and will not be, perfect. To think of it as such obscures the fact that AI technologies are the products of particular decisions made by people within complex organizations. AI technologies are never neutral and always encode specific social values.

As Kevin Kelly also pointed out years ago in his book What Technology Wants, technology is never neutral. It possesses the collective values of its creators. And that’s where things so often go wrong. A great resource on this topic is Sara Wachter-Boettcher’s book Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech.

Mike Monteiro isn’t always everyone’s cup of tea, but I really like his views in Design Ethics & the Truth About Who Designers Really Work For. In short, designers need to work for users:

When you hire me as a designer, I do not work for you. I may practice my craft at your service, but you haven’t earned the right to shape how I practice that craft. One, you don’t want me designing at your level, you want me designing at mine, which means you don’t get to pull the strings. I do. Two, you’re hiring someone who performs a service, not a servant. There’s a difference. I’m not there to do your bidding, I’m there to solve a problem or reach a goal that we agreed upon.

More importantly, designers work for all users, not just the ones who look like them…

And your job, the glorious job you signed up for when you said you wanted to be a designer, is to support all of these people. Make sure none of these incredible voices get lost. And to fight against those who see that brilliant cacophony as a bug and not the greatest feature of all time.

You are our protection against monsters.