The Ethical Design Handbook (Hardcover Print + eBook)

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Over the past 20 years, user privacy has become merely a commodity on the web: there, but hardly ever respected — and often swiftly discarded. No wonder ad-blockers and tracking-blockers have gained traction, and in times when browsers and new legislation such as GDPR and CCPA introduce constraints on data collection, we need to learn how to craft better digital products without dark patterns: products that respect customer choices and are built and designed with ethics in mind.

But how do we get there? Meet The Ethical Design Handbook, our new guide on ethical design for digital products, full of practical guidelines on how to make ethical decisions to influence positive change and help businesses grow in a sustainable way. Download a free PDF excerpt (5 MB) (also available in ePUB and Kindle formats).

You'll learn how to:

explain what ethical design is
justify and prove a business case for ethical design
grow a sustainable business built on ethical design principles
strike the balance between data collection and ethics
embed ethical design into your workflow
get started with ethical transformation

368 pages. Shipping will start early March 2020. Written by Trine Falbe, Martin Michael Frederiksen and Kim Andersen.

About The Book

When we set out to write this book, we wanted to develop a new type of working framework to empower people to practice ethical design in their business, in their teams, and with their products. The reason was simple: too many products we use today have become machines for tricking customers into decisions they never intended to make. Such products are deceptive and manipulative. That's not quite the web we want to see.

It's not necessarily great for revenue either. Deceptive interfaces have huge hidden costs in customer service, maintenance, support, return processing fees, and social media backlash. When we design with dark patterns, we usually don’t account for these costs. But we should.

And recently we’ve started seeing a shift in user perception. People are increasingly fighting back against tracking, manipulation, overwhelming advertising and ambiguous interfaces. There is a growing expectation of transparency, fairness and respect. Failure to meet these expectations is regulated by law, in the form of GDPR and CCPA, as well as the press and the people taking it to social media.

Towards Ethical Design

Now is a good time to shift to ethical design to get things right. But first we need to understand what ethical design actually means, and then make the case for ethical design principles, and introduce an ethical transformation in the organization. By adopting and embracing a new set of design principles, we can grow a sustainable digital business.

These tasks aren't easy, and you might need some help to get there. The Ethical Design Handbook helps you get through all of it. It's a practical guide on ethical decisions for everyone who works with digital products as a designer, developer, product manager, lawyer or in management.

Shipping early March 2020. Written by Trine Falbe, Martin Michael Frederiksen and Kim Andersen.

Introduction
The chapter describes the necessity of incorporating ethical design in the way digital businesses run. It also defines some key terms used throughout the book.
The need for ethics in design
This section outlines some core consequences of unethical design, and it also explores some of the existing ethical design frameworks and introduces the notion of ethical transformation.
We dive into dark patterns, GDPR and existing ethical solutions. You will understand the challenges we are bound to face when embarking onto an ethical transformation.
Creating positive change
This chapter explores how a positive change can be introduced in companies, teams and processes, including how to challenge decisions, ethical team governance and bridging ethics with risk assessment.
We’ll explore how to use a risk matrix to discover ethical design opportunities and what questions to ask to challenge decisions. You will also learn about the ethical governance model and how to develop one.
Respect-driven design
This chapter discusses and challenges how to involve users in projects, and it includes guidelines on how to design for the must vulnerable. Finally, it highlights some business perspectives of human-centered design.
You will learn how to integrate human-centered approach into your workflow, and how to involve users more in your work process, as well as core accessibility techniques, and key ways to design with ethics for children.
The business of ethical design
Let’s dive into business. We establish why ethical design works as a business concept, and how we can use the traditional ways of measuring success to measure the impact of ethical design.
We’ll learn to use road-map planning, what KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to use for ethical design, and we introduce The Ethical Design Scorecard, a tool to assessing the ethical level of products, business and practices.
Ethical design best practices
This chapter provides a set of practical guidelines on how to design good cookie disclaimers, and terms and conditions and how to handle data collection ethically. It also provides a set of specific examples of how to design user interfaces with ethical design in mind.
You’ll learn how to move towarads trustworthy design, how to design ethical user interfaces, and the book also provides an extensive amount of blueprints as data models for digital products.
Getting started
We wrap up the content of the book by offering a set of practical tips and specific blueprints to help you get started on your first ethical design project.

About The Authors

Trine Falbe is a human-centered UX strategist, designer and teacher who works in the intersection between people and business. Trine is deeply passionate about ethical design and designing for children, and she is also a keynote speaker at conferences and a UX advisor in strategic projects.

As a serial entrepreneur since the very first browser, Martin Michael Frederiksen was born with a practical appreciation for the crossroads between business and digital development. He has published the books Cross Channel and the CEO’s Guide to IT Projects That Cannot Fail. He works as an independent consultant for businesses that need a devil’s advocate when trying out new strategies and ideas.

After training at an international advertising agency, Kim Andersen quickly left print media for digital design. Owing to his amazing memory he always leaves design meetings with an empty notebook, only to attend the following meeting armed with drawings where nothing has been forgotten and everything is drawn in great detail. He owns the digital design studio Onkel Kim, where he can be hired to do design tasks, preferably the most difficult and complex ones where the brain is working overtime.