Course  ·  Part 2  ·  Assignment 10

Practise

Identify Ethical Principles

 Time limit: 1 hour

Remember to use your visual timer! We recommend the inventor’s iOS and Android apps — just search for “Time Timer” in the app store.

 

Explanation

In this exercise, you’ll analyse a design brief for a new dating app. The aim is to identify as many ethical issues as you can, including both process-related issues (how the design process will be approached), and final product-related issues (how the app will eventually work).

Instructions

1

Analyse this design brief

 Set your timer: 50 minutes

First, carefully read through the following design brief:

A client has approached you to lead the design of a new dating app. The project is in its very early stages. The client’s idea is for an app that will help people match with more relevant and more local dates than competing services.

The client also wants the app to put more emphasis on people’s life stories, interests, and goals, and make the experience of online dating about more than just swiping on people’s photos.

Next, open your notebook to two facing pages. On the left-hand page, write “process”, and on the right-hand page, write “product”.

Spend the remaining time trying to fill each page with different ideas about possible ethical issues, and how they might be addressed in the context of how the design process is run, or how the product is eventually designed. If you need to use more pages, great!

Here are those ethical principles again:

  • Assess the ethical risks and benefits of every project
  • Anticipate how a design could be misused
  • Design how things will break
  • Treat people as ends, not just as means
  • Design for diversity, inclusion, and accessibility
  • Promote people’s autonomy and informed consent
  • Support people’s best interests
  • Invite and embrace criticism
  • Evaluate the outcomes of completed designs
  • Admit to mistakes and make things right

This exercise is all about using your natural empathy and imagination, so try to complete it without looking at the tips below. But if you get really stuck, feel free to open up them up.

Tips

Here are some questions to consider around the design process:

  • Who would be involved?
  • What steps would the design process consist of?
  • How long would the process take?
  • How would you access design critique?
  • Who would offer design critique? Why?
  • Would the app be tested?
  • How would you know when the app is ready to be launched?

And here are some things to think about when it comes to the design of the app itself. What ethical issues can you think of relating to these themes? How might they be addressed in the design?

  • Data
  • Privacy
  • Safety
  • Matching
  • Meeting up
  • Diversity
  • Sharing contact details
  • Malicious use of the app
  • Subscriptions and payment
  • Algorithmic bias
 
2

Review the example solution

Once you’ve completed your work on this assignment, take a few minutes to review the example solution below.

Example solution

Here are the questions, issues, and ideas we came up with for this assignment:

Process

Diversity

Assuming that the service caters to all adult users, we should involve a diversity of people in the research, design, and testing processes.

We should also imagine and research the different issues people face, and collaborate to generate ideas about how the design of the app could address them. These might include:

  • Age. What challenges and opportunities are experienced by people dating at different stages of life? These might include issues such as looking for a first relationship, dating after separation, and meeting new people after a bereavement. What are people’s different needs, fears, and aspirations?
  • Race. How does structural racial discrimination and unconscious bias affect people’s experience of dating? What issues are faced by different minority ethnic groups? What racial inequalities can dating cause or reinforce?
  • Social and economic class. How does someone’s socio-economic position in society affect their experience of meeting new people?
  • Disability. What issues are faced by disabled people when dating? How do these differ between people with physical disabilities, mental health problems, developmental impairments, and other forms of disability?
  • Sexual orientation. How do the needs of people of different sexual orientations differ? How do these impact the dating experience, and how might that affect people’s requirements of the dating app?
  • Gender identity. What challenges, hopes, and fears are faced by transgender and gender non-conforming people when dating? For people undertaking gender transition, how can these change over time?
  • Nationality, language, and community. How is dating different for people who are using a second language? What is dating like for people who have moved to a new country, town, or community?

Research

Dating is a potentially sensitive subject, and people may share sensitive personal information during our research. We should plan how to conduct our research ethically. Here are some issues to consider:

  • Personal information. How much personal information should we ask people to share, and what research methods are appropriate? What questions or information are off-limits? Should we consult an expert in research methods to advise us?
  • Interviews. One-to-one interviews could generate detailed insights, but might be too intrusive for some people.
  • Online surveys. Surveys which invite written answers might give people more control over what they share. Surveys that use only Likert scales (for example, “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”) are minimally intrusive, but cannot generate any information beyond the questions asked.
  • Privacy. How will we store and process the research data we collect? What measures can we take to protect people’s privacy? How can we make sure our data is held securely?

Testing

We should continue to involve a diverse group of people when we prototype and test the app’s design. Other ethical issues around testing could include:

  • How to test. The app is about helping people connect with potential partners based on their life stories, interests, and goals. Will we test only the experience of using the app, or will we also evaluate the quality of match that people find?
  • Volume of testing. A large number of users and matches might be required to gather good quality testing data. What further issues could be created by large-scale testing of an in-development app?
  • Privacy and safety. What privacy and safety issues might be raised by people using an in-development app for dating? Can these be mitigated?

Product

Safety

  • Communication. Should all messaging take place in-app, so that people can more easily report abuse or harassment? What would the pros and cons of this be?
  • Meeting up. The app could automatically display reminders of safe meeting-up practices, perhaps when certain keywords around meeting up are mentioned in a chat.
  • Blocking. A “block” feature could allow people to choose not to see or receive messages from a particular user (for example, a previous partner).

Habit-forming design

  • Swiping. Many dating apps use a quickfire “swipe” interface, which provides an instant psychological reward, and can become addictive. What other, less addictive interface designs could we consider?

Equality and diversity

  • Algorithmic bias. A problem with machine-generated matching algorithms is that they can reinforce unconscious biases. Does the app need to use algorithms at all? Or could it be more like a “classifieds” board, where people can filter by interests and goals?
  • Personal information. What information is it ethical to display? Which pieces of information should be optional, and which should be required? Should a photo be required? Could this be a dating app that doesn’t use photos at all?
  • Search criteria. If the app had a search or filtering feature, what criteria should people be allowed to choose? To what extent should we as designers decide what people are allowed to search for?

Data and privacy

  • Account and data deletion. People should be able to easily close their accounts and have their data deleted from the app’s servers.
  • Data retention. How long should the app store people’s information before it is automatically deleted? What legal and regulatory issues are there around data retention and deletion?

In conclusion...

Now that you’ve gathered those ideas, in the next assignment you’ll begin designing the dating app. And that will wrap up Part 2!

Assignment version 1.0
Last updated 7 June 2021

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