Does Being Ethical Pay?

'Companies spend huge amounts of money to be 'socially responsible.' Do consumers reward them for it? And how much?' is the leader for a short piece titled Does Being Ethical Pay? just published in Sloan Management Review. The quick answer is "Yes", so it's worth reading further to learn the specific ways that ethicality plays into people's spending decisions.

Here's an excerpt:

In all of our tests, consumers were willing to pay a slight premium for the ethically made goods. But they went much further in the other direction: They would buy unethically made products only at a steep discount.

What's more, consumer attitudes played a big part in shaping those results. People with high standards for corporate behavior rewarded the ethical companies with bigger premiums and punished the unethical ones with bigger discounts.

At least according to this research, being ethical is a necessary attribute for a product.

There are clear implications for product design: ethics should be on the table as a concern at all stages of product development, from ideation and concepting of new products, to the marketing and sales of finished products.

And these (limited, certainly not the final word) findings match with the idea of adding ethics to the set of important user experience qualities captured in Peter Morville's UX Honeycomb.

The (Augmented) Ethical UX Honeycomb

How are user experience designers taking the ethical qualities of their work into account?

local tags: ethics, product_design

Designing Ethical Experiences: Some Practical Suggestions Live @ UXMatters

A quick anouncement: part two of the series on ethics and experience design Designing Ethical Experiences: Some Practical Suggestions, is just live at UXMatters. In this followup to the first installment, you'll find a fiarly extensive set of suggested techniques for resolving conflicts - ethical and otherwise - during the strategy and design phases of experience design efforts. If you've had issues with ethics or conflict during a design effort, these simple techniques should be a useful starting point.

Looking ahead, part three of the series will explore recent research on the way that people make decisions with ethical implications in business settings (good for designers who want to be aware of their own methods and states of mind, and how those drive design work), and the importance of neutral models in making ethical design decisions.

Here's an excerpt:

Thankfully, successfully addressing ethical challenges during design does not require the creation of a formal or detailed code of ethics--or the creation of a professional body that would sustain such an effort. Designers can use the fact that ethical questions often appear first in the form of conflicts--in values, goals, mental models, or otherwise--to manage ethical dilemmas as simply another form of conflict. Further, we can treat conflict as a natural, though often unexplored element of the larger context user experience always seeks to understand. With this framing, conflict becomes a new layer of integrated experiences--a layer that encompasses ethical dilemmas. We can pragmatically incorporate this new layer of ethical dilemmas into our existing frameworks for user experience.

local tags: conflict, conflict_aware_design, ethics, methods, user_experience

User Experience and the Security State: JetBlue's New Terminal

The design of JetBlue's new terminal at JFK as reported in the NY Times is a good example of the intersection of user experience design, and the specific technical and political requirements of the post-9/11 security-oriented state. The layout of the new terminal is focused on directing passengers as quickly as possible through a screen of 20 security lanes, and includes thoughtful features like wide security gates to accommodate luggage and wheelchairs, and rubber flooring for areas where people end up barefoot.

I'm of two minds about designing experiences and architectures specifically to enable security purposes. Anything that improves the currently miserable experience of passing through security screenings is good. (I am waiting for reports on people who show up at the gate wearing only a speedo one of these days, just to make a point.)

But in the long run, do we really want experience design to help us become culturally accustomed to a security-dominated mindset? Especially to the point where we encode this view of the world into our infrastructure? Lurking not so quietly below the surface of the design of the new JetBlue terminal is Bentham's Panopticon (full contents here). The new terminal's floor plan is a classic funnel shape, disturbingly similar in concept to the abattoir / apartment block described in the famous Monty Python Architect Sketch.

Pace layering makes clear that architectures change slowly once in place. And authorities rarely cede surveillance capabilities, even after their utility and relevance expire. Should experience design make an architecture dedicated to surveillance tolerable, or even comfortable?

local tags: architecture, panopticon, privacy, surveillance, user_experience

Video of My BlogTalk Presentation

Video of my BlogTalk presentation 'What happens when everyone designs social media? Practical suggestions for handling new ethical dilemmas' is available from Ustream.tv. The resolution is low (it was shot with a webcam) but the audio is good: follow along with the slides on your own for the full experience.

More videos of BlogTalk sessions here.

local tags: cocreation, conferences, design, diy, ethics, integrated_experiences, methods, social_media, social_networks, spime