Should digital products be ethical?
The ethic is a virtue in human interaction. When someone behaves unethically, we feel angry and not respected.
Digital product is the same. The digital product interacts with users as a counterpart of conversation. The way of interaction should be ethical. Otherwise, the user will feel angry and not respected.
But many digital products seem to forget this fact. They use users as their material to reach the business purpose — manipulate users to provide money, time and data. There are various ways of this manipulation. It is called as a dark pattern.
What is dark pattern?
Here is a definition of the dark pattern in Wikipedia.
A dark pattern is “a user interface that has been carefully crafted to trick users into doing things, such as buying overpriced insurance with their purchase or signing up for recurring bills”
The problem is, these dark pattern is widespread in various ways. Even designers also do not recognise some of dark patterns since these have been out throughout the whole market over a long period of time. Then what kind of dark patterns are out there?
Purdue University conducted extensive research and summarised these unethical patterns into five design strategies:
1. Sneaking
2. Obstruction
3. Nagging
4. Interface interference
5. Forced action
Case study of a dark pattern : Obstacle
Here is a case (picture below) from an online shopping site.
The expected flow is screen 1–2–4 : select a product, Check out and payment.
The dark pattern is on screen 3 as flow 1–2–3–4. So screen 3 shows other related shopping list before the ‘real’ check out, when users already pressed Check out button.
The screen 3 is an Obstruction. It shows related shopping list once again instead of conducting user’s order. This obstruction causes confusion to users by breaking expected flow (against natural mental model) and generates stress by forcing repetition (find Checkout button and press it again). And this negative emotion will be accumulated.
At a glance, dark patterns looks pretty natural but annoyingly working. We have such experiences that we were manipulated by these patterns. It seems like tempting tricks to reach to business purpose in short time.
But if a product is aim to survive in the market for long time, it needs loyal users who truly like the product. So the product naturally permeates into the user’s life cycle.
How can we create ethical products?
First of all, the business needs to set up the perception of users and products.
-Users are not resource for business, but a part of ecosystem building the product together.
-The digital products is for user’s well-being to improve life quality.
Here I introduce 7 principles of ethical design from Humane by Design. The main keywords are Empowering, Finite, Inclusive, Resilient, Respectful, Thoughtful and Transparent.
My conclusion is this.
A digital product is an organically evolving ecosystem contributed by users with the accumulated usage data. When unethical ux patterns interrupt this ecosystem, the data becomes unreliable for following development phases.
That is why..
