Levels of Design Ethics

Designing what is right on a micro, meso, and macro level.

Reviewing The Definition of Ethical Design

In a previous article, I established a working definition of Ethical Design as design that is objectively good, helpful instead of harmful, and ultimately moral—though Ethical Design goes far beyond that simple statement. Design ethics help to make make Ethical Design tangible by setting the standard and defining what it means to actually design ethically. They act as a guide to help designers achieve design that is ethical.

• Design ethics show designers how to work with colleagues, stakeholders, clients and users.
• Design ethics guide designers through their design process with integrity.
• Design ethics help determine features that ought to be in products and services or features that ought not to be.
• Design ethics assist in assessing the ethical significance or moral worth of the products that result from the activity of designing.

My go-to set of ethical principles for UX comes from UXPA’s set of Ethical Principles which are broken up into seven categories:

1. Act in the best interest of everyone
2. Be honest with everyone
3. Do no harm and if possible provide benefits
4. Act with integrity
5. Avoid conflicts of interest
6. Respect privacy, confidentiality, and anonymity
7. Provide all resultant data

Each of these categories have several principles that make them up. I’d encourage you to check those out of you haven’t already. However, this is just the start. Ethical principles on their own aren’t sufficient to understanding ethics in design. I know, it’s getting overwhelming and complicated. Just stay with me. Ethics should always play a significant role in design. Though this is a difficult area for designers, it is one we must press forward in.

In this article I’m going to cover design ethics at varying levels of scope. Essentially we’ll be adding to our definition of Ethical Design:

Ethical Design is design that is objectively good, helpful instead of harmful, and ultimately moral on a micro, meso, and macro level.

Let’s get started.

Levels of Ethics

Levels of Ethics is a conceptual model that divides ethics into systems of varying levels of scope. These levels are directly applicable to Ethical Design. Designers need to consider all 3 levels (or scopes) and understand how they relate to one another while making design decisions.

The Levels of Ethics are:

• Micro: Small systems such as families, relationships, and individuals
• Meso: Medium systems such as organizations, communities, ethnicities, and religions.
• Macro: Large systems such as nations, legal systems, economies, societies, and the entire world.

Levels of Ethics

Micro

Micro level ethics deals with small systems such as families, relationships, and individuals. At a mico level, designers should consider the impact of their design decisions, primarily at the scope of an individual—though relationships and families are included in this scope as well. Some examples of this would be following already established “good practices”, in other words things that many consider staples of UX; Usability, Findability, Usefulness, even Desirability.

At a micro level a designer should be asking questions like:

• Is it useful instead of useless? Will it help users achieve their goals?
• It is easy to use with maximum efficiency and minimal error?
• Is it satisfying to use? Does it make a person want to use it?
• Can a user find their way around your product of service? Can they locate what they are looking for?
• What kind of impact will design decisions have on relationships or families?
• Am I violating the individual’s right to privacy, confidentiality, or anonymity?
• Am I being truthful, not misleading in my design work?

Anti-patterns may better highlight why those questions above matter in the area of ethics in design as they are the antithesis to designing what is right and good. In UX, we often call these anti-patterns “Dark UX Patterns”. Dark UX Patterns are deceptive interactions, designed to mislead or trick users to make them do something they don’t want to do. Leading a user into buying or signing up for something they didn’t intend to, being trapped in a flow, or switching details like pricing without clearly communicating to the user are all examples of Dark UX Patterns. Other examples may include omitting or hiding crucial information like how to cancel a service or requiring users to jump through hoops to do so.

The vast majority of UX design decisions are going to be at a micro-level. These decisions at a micro-level have a cascading effect on meso and macro levels. When working at the micro-level, designers need to understand the implications and impact at those other levels.

Meso

Meso level ethics deals with medium systems such as organizations, communities, ethnicities, and religions. At a meso level, designers should consider the impact of their design decisions at the scope of groups of people. UX naturally moves into this area when focusing on things like Accessibility, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.

At a meso level designers should be asking questions like:

• Will this work for all users?
• Are features and results accessible to users who have to interact with the product differently such as older users, blind or visually impaired communities, and people with dyslexia.
• Do your design decisions, features, products, or services intentionally exclude groups of people based on race, religion, ethnicity or gender?
• What kind of impact does your work have on local communities such as schools, neighborhoods, ethnic groups, religious groups, and cities?
• Do design decisions reflect what’s best for an organization or business that a designer works for or with?
• Will these design decisions have a negative impact on a designer’s colleagues as a whole?

At the meso level a designer shifts their focus towards clusters of people that share something in common; a faith, a zipcode, an employer, an ethnic background, a disability, a life-style, etc. There are many decisions that have the potential to help or harm entire clusters of people. Even in the design of this article, you may noticed this truth. I purposely omitted a cluster of people, in my list, that shares much in common yet is routinely omitted or ostracized, right? Did you notice? Is it unethical to omit the LGBTQIA+ community, from my list above, as an example of a cluster of people at a meso level that designers should be considering? Absolutely! These are the kind of things designers ought to be considering regarding ethics. It is the duty of the designer to know this, identify opportunities, and advocate for improvement.

Macro

Macro level ethics deals with large systems such as nations, legal systems, economies, societies, and the entire world. At a macro level, designers should consider the impact of their design decisions at the scope of the largest systems that span across individuals and clusters of people. UX Designers often will not have a direct impact here. However, their design decisions have a cascading impact at a macro level. Some areas of impact that exist at a macro level would be the environment, wage equality, laws, social norms, and the future of our world.

At a macro level designers should be asking questions like:

• As a designer, who is tasked with making an app or product addictive, what type of impact will that have on society at large?
• As a designer, tasked with designing a camera filter that enhances or drastically changes the appearance of a female, what type of impact with that have on self image of teenagers around the world?
• When designing cheap, physical products that are produced on the the other side of the world, what kind of impact with that have on the environment as landfills fill up with cheap plastic? What type of impact with that have on wages in that other country or my own country?
• As a designer, who is focusing on satisfying users for the sake of company profit, what kind of impact will that have on the expectations and behaviors of businesses across the world if more designers follow my lead?
• As a designer, who designs a way to elevate and amplify the injustices in our nation—bringing people together to successfully advocate for law changes and reform—what kind of impact with that have on generations now and to come in our country?

At the macro level, the focus shifts to the scope of systems that connect us all together. Individuals and clusters of people are impacted by many of the same systems; laws, countries, our planet, the future, and so much more. The argument can be made that the macro level is the most crucial level for getting ethics right, as it effects so many people. The macro level is also where we, as designers, have failed the most. A designer can make the best user-centered apps, products, services that add goodness to the micro and meso levels — all the while ignoring the larger ramifications. And we have. But there is also tremendous opportunity! Designers need not act with fear and trepidation regarding the damage they may do—though they need to consider and avoid it. Designers can literally change the world for the better! The decisions designers make have a cascading effect on multiple scopes in ethical spaces. Be excited about that and look for ways to impact the macro level for good.

Next Up—The Cost of Ethics

Ethical Design is design that is objectively good, helpful instead of harmful, and ultimately moral on a micro, meso, and macro level. Understanding the Levels of Ethics after building on a foundation of Ethical Principles, a working definition of Ethical Design and knowing the role a designer plays in Ethical Design is great. But there’s more!

Doing what is right comes at a cost. Ethical design is a zero-sum game, meaning one person’s gain is another’s loss. Ethical Design comes with trade-offs. In short this means that when looking at the Levels of Ethics; Micro, Meso, and Macro, a win in 2 levels likely means a loss in another level.

I explain more in my next article.