Magic Milestones

Is there really a moral stance for UCD?

I was talking to a guy called Robert Biddle at the conference who made this excellent point:

UCD practitioners qualify what they do from a moral stance saying that the user should be the centre of the development process because the user’s goals should drive the development process. However, there are two reasons why this isn’t true.

1. UCD practitioners aren’t always acting in the interests of the user. For instance, take the case of a parking ticket machine. The user’s goal is to park and go shopping. Their goal does not include paying for parking, this is in fact the customers goal (the company who own the car park/machine). Therefore, in making the user pay for a ticket the UCD practitioner is making the user act in the interest of the customer and not the user.
2. Secondly, who says the user has a “moral right” anyway? If one is designing a missile launcher it could be argued by the pacifist that the moral thing to do would be to make the missile launcher as unusable as possible so that people wouldn’t be killed!

In response to this I would also make two further points.

1. Although the user’s goal is to park and shop and NOT to pay for a ticket they also have another goal: not to pay more money than they need to. When looking at any system we place boundaries on where the system ends and the rest of the world begins. If one takes the system as a complete whole by including concepts of paying versus the concept of being penalised for not paying, the user’s goal becomes “to park, shop and pay for the least amount of money possible”. In which case the UCD practitioner is working in favour of the user in relation to this goal.

However, Robert’s example was not of a ticket machine but of an ATM. The user’s goal (he suggests) is to take money out (maybe more than he has) and not have the bank charge him for it. However, my point would be that this is including the outside world as part of the system rather than working with the boundaries that a UCD practitioner would normally work within i.e. within the system’s boundaries. By saying that the user’s goal is to take money and not be charged is presuming that not charging the individual is good for them. This is looking at the user goals outside of the system boundaries and within the world outside of it. However, if the boundaries of the system are stretched so far that we begin making moral judgements then I could then argue that there are instances where the bank is actually being moral by charging the ATM user. This is because the charge is encouraging the user to be better at handling his money by not going overdrawn and being in debt! In essence we could argue for days but this would be outside of the UCD practitioners boundaries of practice.

However, if moral judgements are outside of the UCD practitioner’s realm of practice there are other, more fundamental issues at stake. For instance, in response to point 2, Helen Sharp made the point that anyone working in IT or systems design should ask themselves about the values of the people they work for and the values of the user when using the systems they are designing. This would mean that within the UCD process there is a value judgement before one starts work as to whether the work being carried out is morally reprehensible or not.

This is a good point but again opens up the question as to how far the boundaries stretch. If the UCD practitioner now has to examine how the system he/she is designing affects others from a moral perspective, rather than simply from a user perspective they are dangerously close to:

1. being accused of straying from the User-Centred Design process altogether in favour of something else entirely (”Human-Centred Design” so that the good of humans not just users are central to system design). In which case they aren’t UCD practitioners at all and have to cope with the questions around which and how many humans are served.
2. In response to Biddle’s claim that they are not “user-centred” but “customer-centred”, they cannot use my previous argument of “setting system boundaries”. In this argument, it is the system boundaries that govern the user’s goals alone. If the boundaries are stretched to include the goals of other agents outside of the system, then the UCD practitioner is not only in danger of straying from the task in hand into the field of moral philosophy but also into value judgements about which agent’s goals are the most important or morally sound. Again, the inclusion of other agents outside of the system boundaries mean that the UCD practitioner fails to remain user-centric.

There is potentially only one way out of this dilemma for the UCD practitioner. The practice following acceptance of the assignment by the UCD practitioner, must be separated from the moral judgement that takes place before the assignment is accepted. If we take medicine as an example, a surgeon may turn down an operation which will result in active termination of a life (such as an abortion) because he is in effect “siding” with the unborn patient over that of the mother patient. In this instance, the “customer” could be seen as the hospital trust who have set the moral boundaries for the surgeon’s work if he accepts the assignment. However, he isn’t allowed to take the operation and then decide to act in the interests of the un-born child rather than the mother.

In the same way, when a UCD practitoner takes on an assignment, they are already accecpting the customer’s point of view and accepting that the user’s goal is convergent with that of the customer’s (at least to some degree). When a UCD practitioner is faced with having to design a missile launcher he/she must first ask whether they can morally work for the customer and in accepting to work for that customer they are sautomatically setting the moral boundaries in which they will work. In doing this they are also accepting the system boundaries, in the case of the missile launcher, accepting that the soldier working the launcher won’t suddently suffer a crisis of conscience and want the launcher not to work and in the case of the cash machine, that the user goals when taking money out of the cashpoint are to recieve cash in line with the bank’s expectations.