archive.Joe Lamantia.com

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.

*Apologies for another announcement posting* but now that the program is final, I can mention that I’ll be speaking at EuroIA 2007 in lovely Barcelona, as part of the panel Perspectives on Ethics, moderated by Olly Wright. My presentation discusses conflict and ethics as an aspect of design for social online environments.

I shared some initial thoughts on this (under served) area last year, in a short post titled Conflict-Aware Design: Accounting For Conflict In User Experiences. The essential message of this post – and the thing I’m thinking about most regarding the question of conflict – is “conflict equals interest, and interest should be a focus for design.” The panel will be the forum for sharing promised (but not complete) follow-up postings.

While prepping the submission, I was working with this treatment for the topic.

Conflict is a fundamental component of human character and relations, with important ethical dimensions. Yet conflict rarely appears as an explicit consideration during the process of designing the experiences, architectures, systems, or environments that make up the new social and participatory media we use daily. Now that media are social, conflict is inevitable.

How can (or should) designers ethically address conflict within design efforts? Does an ethical framework for design require us to manage conflict in character and relations actively? What mechanisms or social structures should designers use to address conflict within new experiences? Are there new kinds of conflict created or necessitated by the social and participatory environments emerging now?

Some specific areas of discussion: privacy, identity, ownership, responsibility, speech.

I’d love any thoughts on the topic, the treatment, the implications, etc.

Fellow panelists at EuroIA include:

• Olly Wright, Media Catalyst, NL
• Thomas J. Froehlich, Kent State University, US
• special mystery panelist…

Barcelona is a magnificent city…

The full conference program is available at this address http://www.euroia.org/Programme.aspx, and the roster of speakers along is worth the trip to Barcelona.

And DrupalCon Barcelona happens at the same time – I wonder what sort of cross-pollination will emerge…?

Viva Catalunya!

Conflict is a natural part of human experience. It’s something we encounter every day on levels small and large, and learn to address. And conflict appears at every level of a user experience, from business goals and strategy, user needs, concept and mental models, to task flows, screen-based interactions, terminology, and visual design choices.

Yet many of our user experience practices and approaches do not consider conflict adequately, or at all. User experience design assumptions, artifacts, habits of communication, and working practices combine to bypass adequate consideration of conflict. The result is neglect of conflict as an area of investigation, discussion, and design responsibility. It becomes something we consider only in passing, generally by noting an order of priority for the personas associated with an evolving design

Minimizing conflict may seem pragmatic: exploring conflict makes many people nervous, and stakeholders may not react well unless properly prepared. But this view misses the significance of conflict. Conflict is a pointer to something people care about, pay attention to, need, want, or think is important in some way.

In the same way that smoke equals fire, conflict equals interest, and interest should be a focus for design.

Social Architectures, Experiences, and Environments
Conflict is an especially important area for User experience design to consider now, thanks to the emerging landscape of social media. Social networks, participatory architectures, business and community models dependent on co-creation of content, and collaborative media formats all emphasize social dynamics. These dynamics inevitably include elements of conflict. The continued growth of sharing, networks, interconnections, and complex relationships linking individuals and groups on-line will only increase the role and significance of conflict for successful user experience efforts.

Plainly, if we aim to design for user experiences now and in the future, we must account for conflict. In terms of the evolution of user experience design, the consideration of conflict marks another step in the continued maturation of the field. We might call design approaches that take conflict into account conflict-aware design.

Conflict-aware Design In Practice
Conflict-aware design offers substantial value for designers, stake holders, users – all interested parties, really – with little impact on timelines, costs, approaches, or existing methods. Conflict is simply another aspect of the user experience to explore and understand, share analysis of with decision makers, and direct design solutions to address.

Conflict-aware design builds on and enhances existing practices, adding a layer of context at each stage of the design cycle concerned with the specific conflicts that will impact the user experience. No specialized design documents or techniques are required.

The second part of this essay will consider how common user experience activities and artifacts can be adapted for conflict-aware design.