Dimensions of UX Practice that Shape Ethical Awareness

Dark Patterns and the Legal Requirements of Consent Banners: An Interaction Criticism Perspective

“…Previous scholarship has revealed markedly different discourses regarding ethical concerns, with the academic community largely focused on arguing in relation to moral and ethics theory (e.g., [41,42,86]) and the practitioner community focused more on tangible and problematic practices (e.g., [18,22,49,50]). While there has been substantial interest in ethically-focused design practices in the HCI community for decades, most of this work has been subsumed into one of three categories: 1) the development and maintenance of a code of ethics in the ACM, including relevant use of this code in education and practice [46,72,101]; 2) the construction and validation of methods to support ethics-focused practice, most commonly within the methodology of Value-Sensitive Design (VSD; [41,42]); and 3) the use of practitioner-focused research to reveal patterns of ethical awareness and complexity [25,49,84,85,87,88,92,99].…”

Tactics of Soft Resistance in User Experience Professionals' Values Work

“…Gray et al write that designers' ethical practices shape and are shaped by their individual practices, by organizational practices, and by knowledge and reasoning built through education [26]. Chivukula et al find that the positionality of user experience in an organization, such as the extent to which UX professionals are valued, affects the extent to which they can surface and address ethical issues [12]. This paper's empirical research provides new sites and entry points to study values work, building on prior research: participants are recruited from positions within established or large technology companies, compared to Shilton's study of technical practitioners in academic labs [61] or Gray et al's broader focus that includes UX professionals at design agencies or consultancies [26].…”

“…This connects practices of everyday work to broader practices of technology worker criticism, contestation, and resistance [64]. To recruit people who might involved in seeking these types of changes, this paper recruits UX professionals who explicitly see their work as political and values laden, and work within established or large technology companies in the United States, compared to other projects that seek to sample a broader set of UX professionals [12].…”

“…The lens of soft resistance to analyze UX professionals' practices expands prior frameworks such as ethical mediation [26] or ethical design complexity [12,26]. While these approaches also look at how designers' practices are intertwined with organization power, ethical mediation and ethical design complexity focus on how values and ethics emerge as a part of designers' everyday technical design practice.…”

“…In parallel to these practices, prior empirical research in CSCW and related fields has studied how values and ethics emerge as a part of the everyday work of technology researchers and practitioners [41,61], data scientists [55], security professionals [42], and user experience (UX) professionals [12,26]. Further research has sought to develop new theories, frameworks, methods, and tools to help technology practitioners grapple with a range of social values and ethical issues in their everyday work.…”