Exploring the experience of ethical tensions and the role of community in UX practice
Ajit G. Pillai, Thida Sachathep, Naseem Ahmadpour
Abstract
User Experience (UX) practitioners are increasingly playing the role of ethicists, where they must make responsible design decisions and envisage the consequences of their design. This requires practitioners to act with intent and align their decision-making with ethical implications while navigating professional, organisational and business objectives. How can we support UX practitioners to deal with ethical tensions in this complex and uncertain space that encompasses many inter-personal, social and temporal dimensions? To explore this issue, we follow an iterative participatory design approach with 13 UX practitioners. Our findings revealed ethical tensions are experienced at different levels of micro (self, other design teams), meso (management or organisation as a whole) and macro (society) pertaining to varied practitioners attitudes towards ethical tensions (investigating, suppressing and mediating). The communities that UX practitioners relate to were found to be vital sites of care and safety that enable members to surface and mediate ethical tensions. We propose new directions for resources to support practitioners in dealing with multi-faceted ethical tensions.