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The importance of ethics in UX design
What could we do with a button?
We could make it more prominent. More tempting to click. Bigger. More colourful. We could place the button in an area of the screen that we know the user will scan when they land on the site.
We could do a lot with a button. Now all we need to decide is should we do something with this button?
It may seem like a silly question, but it could have potentially big ramifications for any user we’re showing this button to. For example, imagine if the button signed away all your personal information and allowed whoever is in control of the button to sell your information on to another third party. Suddenly, making the button way more tempting to click might be a little unethical, mightn’t it? It would effectively be coercing the user into doing something they might not actually want to do, but feel they have no choice but to do it.
A classic example of this is with cookies. No, not the tasty chocolate chip ones you get from the local bakery, but the ones online, stored in your browser.
Typically, cookies are fairly innocuous. They tend to serve a purpose of remembering who you are over different web pages, so when you go from skimming your emails to checking your next meeting in your calendar, Google doesn’t have to repetitively ask you to log in again and again.
However, there are some cookies you might want to avoid. If you value your privacy a lot, you might not want to be tracked across websites. But you might not know that you keep letting companies do it anyway, and you probably are.
In the bad examples above, the developers of these popups know that a user will be getting frustrated when they land on a site where they want to find some information, and at least 40% of the screen is asking for them to accept what appear to be fairly innocuous cookie terms. They dress the accept buttons up in bold, eye-catching colours and make the option of just accepting very tempting — as it’s the easiest thing to do to keep living your life. The Daily Mail (pictured) even disguises the acceptance of cookies as a button which…
