Laws of UX: Using Psychology to Design Better Products & Services

Ethics must be an integral part of the design process, because without this check and balance, there may be no one advocating for the end user within the companies and organizations creating technology. The commercial imperatives to increase time on site, streamline the consumption of media and advertising, or extract valuable data don’t match up with human objectives of accomplishing a task, staying connected with friends or family, and so on. In other words, the corporate goals of the business and the human goals of the end user are seldom aligned, and more often than not designers are a conduit between them. If behavior can be shaped by technology, who holds the companies that build technology to account for the decisions they make?

It’s time that designers confront this tension and accept that it’s our responsibility to create products and experiences that support and align with the goals and well-being of users. In other words, we should build technology that augments the human experience rather than replacing it with virtual interaction and rewards. The first step in making ethical design decisions is to acknowledge how the human mind can be exploited. We must then take accountability for the technology we help to create and ensure it respects people’s time, attention, and overall digital well-being.

Homogeneous teams often have difficulty identifying blind spots that exist outside their own shared life experiences. This inevitably leads to less-resilient products and services, which can have disastrous results when things go wrong. To avoid the pitfalls of homogeneous thinking, there are a number of things that teams responsible for building technology can do. First, they can ensure they’re as diverse as possible—a team comprising different genders, races, ages, and backgrounds brings a broader spectrum of human experience into the design process from the outset. It’s also important to ensure the personas derived from target audience research aren’t exclusively focused on the user segments considered essential for an MVP—the more diverse the audience you design for, the more likely it is that you’ll catch blind spots before they become bigger problems.