Respect is the one value
Earlier this week, I tweeted that if I could have everyone on earth adopt a single design value, it would be respect for users.
Many people agreed, but I wasn’t surprised to get some pushback. One or two people said this was silly or superfluous — caring for users is what UX is about, after all; why would it need to be stated as a design value? I will refer you to our current world for evidence of how respect being a core value of (the best part of) the UX profession isn’t enough to get us respectful products and services — let alone institutions. But there are several more pieces that are important.
First of all, values don’t automatically flow upward in an organization. (They do flow downward — I have never worked anywhere, from an 8-person consultancy to the US government, where the personal values of leadership weren’t reflected in the culture.) Bringing the UX team’s deep values of respect and care for users to departments outside design and to leadership as a whole is hard work. It takes powerful communication and tireless social/organizational scutwork on top of exemplary practice. In UX, it can be so tempting to think that if we just do great design and research work, all good things will follow. It’s not that it never happens, but in my experience the places where that’s least likely to be enough are the places where we’re needed most.
I do UX in government. It’s a relatively new discipline in that domain, so I’m constantly (and happily) explaining it to my colleagues who are career civil servants. It helps enormously to be very explicit about what I’m talking about, especially as I work with them to apply design values in real services. “So if we do take respect for people’s time as one of our major values, what would that mean about how we could improve a court visit? Would it always have to be shorter? Which use of time is most valuable? (Time spent on parking and logistics is almost always low-value, do we have any options to help with that?)” “X County Court told me they use an approach of helping people complete their divorce with the fewest possible trips to court — let’s look at what that led them to do.” My colleagues are dedicated, mission-oriented people who have spent their careers helping the public, but they haven’t had the tools to think about service design in this exact way. The same is true of most engineers and executives, and many product and marketing folks too. However well-disposed they may be toward their users (I’ll talk in a moment about the exceptions who aren’t), it’s easier for them to actually do right if there’s explicit agreement on what “right” means.
An interesting thing about respect, and in my opinion one of its strengths as a broad value, is that it’s very hard to disagree with on its face, while also being easy to analyze on a deeper level. The answer to “should we respect our users?” is almost always “of course!” which means you can immediately turn to the question of what it means for your particular users in the specific context where you’re meeting them. (This is definitely a case for applying the Platinum Rule.) One of the most effective service designs I’ve encountered in recent years was for Safelite Autoglass. I had a nasty crack in the windshield to get fixed— a chore I didn’t ask for, and that I expected to be a huge pain in the ass. But the Safelite service (which had components on mobile and desktop web, phone, and in person) seamlessly kept track of where I was in the process and even guided me through the part with my insurance company, without ever being cute or fancy. I wouldn’t even really call it delightful, although I was impressed and pleased — we both knew it was a chore and we were both focused on getting the job done. It embodied a very unpretentious, American kind of respect for me — like shaking hands with an honest worker. It’s not the exact same kind of respect I want from my doctor or my elected representative or my social-media giant, but it’s the kind that gave me confidence then and will bring me back if I crack a windshield again.
It can be daunting to envision what truly respecting users in all circumstances might mean. The immediate trigger for this round of reflection was a horror story from Reddit about a gynecologist commenting inappropriately on a teenager’s intimate grooming — a complete failure of respect, and many times worse because of the power dynamic. Most of us have had an experience where a medical professional failed to respect us, and can imagine how much easier and less stressful getting care would be if respect were baked into these interactions. But taking imagination a step further, what would the entire experience of getting care be like if respect for patients was designed in at the institutional level? What if the education system prioritized respect for students and their interests and needs? As Emma Burnett commented, what if the design of our political campaigns saw respect as a way to winning rather than a necessary casualty of that focus?
When I first started writing about respect as a design value, I put forward time, dignity, and abilities as key targets for respect from institutions. Now I think there’s one more: respect for people’s agency. Having a choice is fundamental to using any service; trying to restrict or reduce that to support business goals is unethical. Diverting people’s attention when they haven’t agreed to give it to you is a form of theft. Serving people poorly when they don’t have a choice is even worse — a failure of moral responsibility. (If you really want a thought experiment, imagine making the experience of receiving public benefits, or even of an arrest, as respectful as possible).
Institutions like government are very hard to (re)design, and big software is reaching a scale and level of influence in our lives where it’s fair to think of it in the same light. Our biggest, broadest-audience software services are failing on respect for agency right now, using our information in ways we never agreed to and disregarding our stated preferences with abandon. Our power position with respect to the major internet companies is compromised because of the advertising model that so many of them run on, but that only increases their responsibility to treat users decently. Unfortunately, it’s clear from some of their actions that their approach to power is “we don’t have to respect people who have less of it.” However many strong UX practitioners work at those companies (and many do), that approach is perfectly in line with the sneering playground bullyism that is the face of American authoritah in our era, and especially under the current administration. Lots of UX practitioners and teams might say “we’re better than that,” but clearly we aren’t better enough.
To put it more clearly: it doesn’t matter if our field holds values like respect dear, if we’re not able to get businesses and institutions to adopt those values and apply them to their work. That’s virtually impossible without being explicit about them, however simple they may seem, and following that explicitness with exploration, persuasion, backup from studies, and appropriate pressure. Repetition, relationship-building, small steps — it’s grinding social-intellectual work, and I feel for all the great UX folks out there trying to help their organizations do right. But the doing right is what matters, and in the end we need to support each other to do that work, to that end, or we fail. (Respect helps with that work too, for what it’s worth.)
