How to Avoid Bad Design Decisions: Ethical & Multiversal UX Design

Avoid deceptive patterns. Be honest with users. Think about your purpose for design and how your own values align with the design.

Think about goals and metrics. Understand your company’s business goals and key performance indicators. Pay attention to how these business goals might contradict or align with your users’ goals.

Share good design practices with the people you work with. Understand your position of power as a UX designer. You have the ability to influence the decision-making process for good and make sure that the right design choices are being made.

The more we respect users’ time, attention, and experiences, the easier it will be to keep the focus of design on people, their needs, and the ways they can enjoy technology.

Ethical design is about understanding how your design work affects the world.

A dominant culture affects the values or norms that are important for other cultures. If a dominant culture’s influence is too strong, many cultural points of view might not be considered in the design process. This means that some users might be left out.

• Conducting thorough research with a diverse group of people is a great way to make sure your work meets all users’ needs.
• How are the people using your product different from you?
• How can you help people from non-dominant cultures feel more included in your product design?
• Are there any challenges that people from certain groups or backgrounds might face as they experience your product?
• If you feel a certain way about the product you’re designing, what’s the opposite of that feeling? Chances are, one of your users has that opposite perspective.

A marginalized population: is one where people experience discrimination or exclusion from mainstream society because of specific characteristics or life experiences that are wrongfully deemed as inferior.

• People with disabilities
• People with limited access to technology
• People who speak different languages

Underrepresented populations are groups of people whose values and experiences aren’t represented often enough in a society that’s shaped by the dominant culture and their point of view. Underrepresented populations include people of certain genders or sexualities, people of colour, and ethnic minorities, among others.

• How can I design products so that the dominant culture is not always viewed as the norm?
• How can I design products in a way that encourages all perspectives to be included?

Edge cases are situations that a user experiences with a product that the designers didn’t prepare for. The situation or obstacle that arises is beyond the user’s control to fix.

It’s important to anticipate potential issues that could pop up for all different types of users. Be flexible and ready to adjust your designs throughout the process to account for these kinds of unexpected issues among groups of users that you might not have initially considered.

Inclusive design means making design choices that take into account personal identifiers like ability, race, economic status, language, age, and gender. Having a diverse team of researchers and designers, including those from traditionally excluded populations, is key to inclusive design. This practice ensures a variety of unique perspectives is present during all phases of the design process.

The goal of a UX designer is to build experiences that are accessible to users with the widest range of abilities. In other words, no one should be excluded from using a product because designers didn’t consider their needs when building it. In inclusive design, there is no such thing as normal, and there is no “average” person to design for.

Accountability: One way to help make sure that your product designs are inclusive for all users is to be held accountable by the people you work with and the users you’re designing for. Seek out the opinions of users, coworkers, and stakeholders who are different from you. As you learn more about their perspectives, approaches, and how situations affect them, you can incorporate their insights into your designs.

Design Ethically

• Create inclusive personas: Consider marginalized or underrepresented users when creating personas to avoid serving only users who seem “typical” or universal to you. Being intentional and inclusive when creating personas will prevent your product from advancing the same ideas about which kinds of cultures are or are not valued. As a UX designer, you should still use practical demographic factors like age, gender, and ability to create personas, but you need to be flexible and ready to change them whenever you notice their limitations.
• Broaden your definition of “stakeholder”: Traditionally, you might think of stakeholders as project leaders, managers, investors, and those in high-level decision-making roles. But if you broaden the definition of the term, a stakeholder is any person or place that a project can affect. By broadening the definition of the stakeholders you’re designing for, you can design with a much wider audience in mind.
• Increase collaboration: The more you collaborate with the many different types of people who are impacted by your products, the more insight you can gain from their participation. And while that’s generally better for the greater good of society, it’s also often better for your product design, too!

How to better collaborate with many different types of people:

• Ask yourself: Do the small details that go into design decisions encourage all perspectives to be included?
• Think beyond universal design. Even the most universal design principles need to be modified to fit a new context, and that context becomes broader as you engage with more diverse users.
• Consider “multiversal” design solutions. Multiversal (or, Pluriversal) refers to the many ways that a design works for different people, while universal means that one design method works for many users. A multiversal design principle means making sure that a design has more than just one point of entry or more than one way to meaningfully experience it. For example, when designing for someone with sight and someone without sight, they should both be able to experience the final design equally, without missing out on anything.

Stay accountable, be inclusive, and don’t forget the impact your work can make on the world.

The products you design will be a part of the users’ lives, but they should not:

• Consume or control the user.
• Promote addictive behaviours.
• Promote unhealthy relationships between the user and a device or an app.
• Take advantage of the user

Instead, the products you design should give users a choice about the actions they do want to take while using your product. Remember, apps should engage users, but apps should also be honest about their intentions and goals.