Tensions in Enacting a Design Philosophy in UX Practice

Abstract

Design culture is increasingly present within organizations, especially with the rise of UX as a profession. Yet there are often disconnects between the development of a design philosophy and its translation in practice. Students preparing for UX careers are positioned in a liminal space between their educational experience and future practice, and are actively working to build a bridge between their developing philosophy of design and the translation of that philosophy when faced with the complexity of design practice. In this study, we interviewed ten students and practitioners educated within design-oriented HCI programs, focusing on their design philosophy and evaluating how their philosophical beliefs were shaped in practice. Building on prior work on flows of competence, we thematically analyzed these interviews, identifying the philosophical beliefs of these designers and their trajectories of development, adoption, or suppression in industry. We identify opportunities for enhancements to UX educational practices and future research on design complexity in industry contexts.

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].…”

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., [41,42,83]) and the practitioner community focused more on tangible and problematic practices (e.g., [18,21,49,50]). 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 [46,70,99]; 2) the construction and validation of methods to support ethicsfocused 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 [25,49,81,82,84,85,89,97]. Work on VSD has also included efforts across these categories that identify opportunities for implementation in design and evaluation activities [28,84,95] as well as broader engagement in ethics-focused argumentation, building connections from ethical and moral theories to HCI and Science and Technology Studies (STS) concerns (e.g., [16,30,57,61,67]).…”

Scaffolding Ethics-Focused Methods for Practice Resonance

“…Across the three levels that we have identified, scholarly attention has previously focused primarily on the mediation of tools in relation to the organization and the practitioner (e.g., practitioner-focused mediation in [49,87] and methodologically-focused mediation in [27,29]). However, there have also been rare instances of practitioner interest documented in the research literature that may precede or frame a call to action [14,84,87]. However, our framing of intentions as a specific and articulated interactional layer appears to be a new means of support that could be further investigated.…”