How might I design with responsibility?
Recognizing the impact of how we design.
I have been a “designer” for the last couple of years, where rolling out projects and meeting deadlines had become an integral part of my daily routine so much so that I forgot to zoom out and look at the bigger picture.
The pandemic allowed me to do this and I used this break to reflect and re-assess my approach towards the way I design.
I worked primarily in the digital space. The recent years have been mostly about removing friction in adoption and conversion. I learned to design to reduce cognitive load while I became aware of nuances that are easy to overlook when one loses sight of the users, my focus became — How can I improve upon this?
But did the user need any improvements? Was there a problem? How is the solution going to make a long-term difference? Will the improvement for ‘user A’ become a problem for ‘user B’? In all seriousness, I forgot to answer these questions.
So, what is responsible design anyway?
Responsible design is an attitude that emphasizes the needs and experiences of people over concerns of form or aesthetics. (The people, place, and space reader) Currently, most of the design focuses on efficient, fast, and desirable service experience while doing this we ignore the significant role that design plays as a change agent. There is a need of thinking about the whole ecosystem, moving from human-centered to Humanity Centred. Responsible Design allows us to think about strategy from a humanity perspective. (Podcast — Responsible Design by Dr, Girish Prabhu)
Now there we’re all on the same page, let us dive into what I want to write about: Navigating the issue of design ethics and inclusivity through my recent project. Recognizing the impact of how we design, through my learnings from the project.
My recent project was for family and what is ‘Good Help’ for them. This project was very different than most due to the sheer reason of it not coming with a set of problems or requirements, deliverables or, deadlines (apart from submissions) to be achieved. It came with an existing system and a bundle of data where we had to find our way to:
- Understand the system
- Provide a design solution vision
As generic as this sounds, the journey was equally challenging and eye-opening. Let me tell you how.
Designing with Ethics — a little more than just good intentions
I was introduced to the Principle of Design Ethics in our student-led sessions. This took me back to the years I spent delivering experiences for the users, trying to design things that don’t cause unintended harm. In my understanding, I did pretty well, just when I got introduced to the concept of Dark Patterns — design patterns specifically designed to trick users into doing something they don’t necessarily want to do. Harry Brignull, states “Dark Patterns work because they take advantage of the human brain’s weaknesses and the way we are hard-wired”.
Although Dark Patterns is the term used in the digital world, it resonated with me during this unit. One of the design considerations for the service concept revolved around a solution that involved co-design and co-creating alongside the family.
‘Families want to be seen through their strengths and not their risks’
-Quote from one of our Stakeholder Interview.
Online portals showcased that there is an immense amount of help available but, what it did not show was how can one navigate to it. The websites failed to display transparency in the process something that the user needs especially during emotional and uncertain situations. To mitigate this, we aimed for a concept where the power is in the pocket of the primary user, enabling them to make an informed choice (transparent and simple process) about how they want to be supported and creating tools that showed their strengths rather than problems by reflecting upon their positive experiences.
Inclusive Design — design beyond trends
To be honest, up till a couple of months ago, I had a rather simple and superficial understanding of the term, “inclusive design”. I thought that it was mainly about accessibility and making design and content easier to consume and utilize, which I call reducing cognitive load.
As Microsoft explains, Inclusive Design is a methodology, born out of digital environments, that enables and draws on the full range of human diversity. Most importantly, this means including and learning from people with a range of perspectives.
Inclusive design is all of that, but what I learned is, it lets people and their many abilities, limitations, and differences guide and shape its possibilities, conception, and implementation. But how can we ensure that the chosen service does not exclude certain groups of people?
While researching we saw barriers like digital literacy, digital poverty, language, and stigma. Which brings me to our next design consideration, how do we ensure that digital literacy and proficiency are not the basic requirements for essential services? and how do we make the interaction more human?
‘People who need help the most, are usually the last ones to ask for it. Make sure that the way you communicate with them has to be as approachable as possible, don’t make them feel intimidated.’
-Quote from one of our Stakeholder Interview
During ideation, it didn’t take long to think about a digital interface or an ice-breaking card game as a solution to ask questions informally. However, will a card game solve the purpose? Or will it portray an impression of a game while the user is going through a roller coaster of emotions? Will applying an informal methodology make it any different from the current method of formal assessment? Will it make them feel less overwhelmed? Will the solution cater to all types of users? But, who is our user? While we questioned our ideas, we came across an interesting talk by Idean, ‘Cards for Humanity’, an engagement activity for a conversation starter. The session helped us identify our primary and extreme users and whether the service concept/vision serves them equally. All these years, I was asked to narrow down on a target audience as you can’t design for all. When I was asked to think about extreme users (the last person who will use this service), I struggled. It made me realize that I was so used to thinking the obvious, looking at the obvious target segment, blindsiding the users who will come last (in client language — tertiary users whom we can target post MVP, which hardly happens).
Thinking systems first approach — take a wider lens
Most of my projects start with ‘Discovery’ which was the same here as well, except here, we were supposed to understand the existing system of seeking help as opposed to the user interview approach for most of the other projects.
We mapped the universe of stakeholders involved in the Help industry and studied how issues manifest for families, service providers, family workers, and even institutions like schools and health. Then, we traced connections, causes, intertwined topics and studied them to identify a lens.
Figure 01, is the map that we first created to understand the system where green circles are services, purple are user needs and the blue is access points. Once we connected the gigantic map we could see that ACCESSIBILITY of services is a problem and made that our lens and the start point of the discovery phase.
My learnings
Reality check
Sometimes while designing for your ‘target audience’ you lose sight of other people. We created an impact map to understand how the service will benefit our immediate and extreme users. We questioned, who will benefit? Who loses? Who is excluded? And perhaps most importantly, what are the potential barriers? Airbnb created a research tool called Another Lens. The tool has a series of questions to help you understand how inclusive is your product or service? Though we could not get through all but was a great start point for the team.
‘Question everything generally thought to be obvious’
– Dieter Rams
Take a step back to move forward
Zoom out on regular basis, we assigned this task to one person who would constantly go back to question why we are doing what we are doing so that we don’t lose track of the WHY bit. This forced us to constantly iterate and not get married to things we propose.
Co-create, Don’t Dictate
Design what the user needs and not what you think the user might need. Since the project was short bound, we did not get much time to test or co-create the service with actual users. But this didn’t stop us, we tested the framework with our own families to understand its implications and refine it to its best.
If I could learn one thing to help me on this project, what would that one thing be?
I learned to question my design and realized that every bit of design inclusion and responsibility we build into our products and services sets the stage up for more. I found a line in the closing chapter of ‘Holmes’ book, Mismatch — how Inclusion shapes design especially poignant.
‘Many of us are temporarily able-bodied and will face new kinds of exclusion as we age’.
References
What are Dark Patterns? https://www.darkpatterns.org/
Another Lens, A research tool for conscientious creatives -https://airbnb.design/anotherlens/#answer15
Inclusive design- https://www.microsoft.com/design/inclusive/
Idean — Cards for Humanity-https://cardsforhumanity.idean.com/
Design and Social responsibility by William Mangold-https://peopleplacespace.org/
Inclusive and Responsible Design — Where do I start-https://uxdesign.cc/some-thoughts-on-inclusive-and-responsible-design-5a9b47954f98
Podcast — Responsible Design with Dr. Grirish Prabhu
