As designers, we are here to solve problems and to make user’s life better. But how much it really helping the users in one way? We see, now digital platforms are gaining momentum like never did in the history, some giant whales are ruling the world. The purpose of getting these things into daily lives is to make things easier. But the invisible damage caused by using these apps is alarming.
I see a dotted line demarcation between ethical and unethical aspects of design. From my perspective the design need to be persuasive for the user to be engaged and at the same time it should not be so much persuasive that it makes user to go beyond engagement and get addicted. I assume this also depends on the products and their intentions. For suppose if products are intended to drive vaccinations or educational awareness, i dont see no point in not making them persuasive enough without any thoughts on limiting it to engagement(This kind of motivates the designers and get them habituated to incorporate persuasions in core design). I also believe persuasion in design can only be attained by understanding and tapping the core factors of human technology like motivation, capabilities and triggers. These core factors may remain the same at a very basic level but they do evolve with time and generations and hence a product which used to be engaging in 90s is not relevant anymore(Orkut used to dominate social networks until facebook arrived). With all this pros and cons, incorporating ethics in design going forward is the best way of practice according to me, As a designer, i believe in incorporating ways/options to amend the product usage by providing options such as limiting the app usage, pushing notifications when the system sees certain user behavior trends that might push the user to addiction with higher probability. Going forward, i also try to analyze the usability of product from 5 human and environmental aspects like privacy, accessibility, sustainability, usability and focus. This also reminds me about the legend in social psychology Robert Cialdini and his 6 principles of persuasion, These 6 principles used to guiding pointers for all the people in Advertising and their marketing campaigns. I assume these 6 principles need to be carefully incorporated and tested during UX design to make our product engaging and yet non addictive.
But what should the designer follow here? Ethics or getting profits to company is again subjective.