Tags: responsibility

My colleague Chris has written a terrific post over on the Clearleft blog: Is the planet the missing member of your project team?

Rather than hand-wringing and finger-wagging, it gets down to some practical steps that you—we—can take on every project.

Chris finishes by asking:

Let me know how you design with the environment in mind. What practical advice would you suggest?

Well, here’s something that I keep coming up against…

Chris shows that the environment can be part of project management, specifically the RACI methodology:

We list who is responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed within the project. It’s a simple exercise but the clarity is useful for identifying what expertise and input we should seek from the named individuals.

Having the planet be a proactive partner in your project ensures its needs are considered.

Whenever responsibilities are being assigned there are some things that inevitably fall through the cracks. One I’ve seen over and over again is responsibility for third-party scripts.

On the face of it this seems like another responsibility for developers. We’re talking about code here, right?

But in my experience it is never the developers adding “beacons” and other third-party embedded scripts.

Chris rightly points out:

Development decisions, visual design choices, content approach, and product strategy all contribute to the environmental impact of your website.

But what about sales and marketing? Often they’re the ones who’ll drop in a third-party script to track user journeys. That’s understandable. That’s kind of their job.

Dropping in one line of JavaScript seems like a victimless crime. It’s just one small script, right? But JavaScript can import more JavaScript. Tools like Request Map Generator can show just how much destruction third-party JavaScript can wreak:

You pop in a URL, it fetches the page and maps out all the subsequent requests in a nifty interactive diagram of circles, showing how many requests third-party scripts are themselves generating. I’ve found it to be a very effective way of showing the impact of third-party scripts to people who aren’t interested in looking at waterfall diagrams.

Just to be clear, the people adding third-party scripts to websites usually aren’t doing so maliciously. They often don’t realise the negative effect the scripts will have on performance and the environment.

As is so often the case, this isn’t a technical problem. At root it’s about understanding people’s needs (like “I need a way to see what pages are converting!”) and finding a way to meet those needs without negatively impacting the planet. A good open-minded discussion can go a long way.

So I echo Chris’s call to think about environmental impacts from the very start of a project. Establish early on who will have the ability to add third-party scripts to the site. Do all of those people understand the responsibility that gives them?

I saw this lack of foresight in action on a project recently. The front-end development was going really well and the site was going to be exceptionally performant: green Lighthouse scores across the board. But when the site went live it had tracking scripts. That meant that users needed to consent to being tracked. That meant adding another third-party script to generate a consent banner. It completely tanked the Lighthouse scores.

I’m sure the people who added the tracking scripts and consent banners thought they had no choice. But there are alternatives. There are ways to get the data you need without the intrusive surveillance and performance-wrecking JavaScript.

The problem is that it’s not the norm. “Everyone else is doing it” was the justification for Flash intros two decades ago and it’s the justification for enshittification via third-party scripts now.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? | The New Yorker

Bosses have certain goals, but don’t want to be blamed for doing what’s necessary to achieve those goals; by hiring consultants, management can say that they were just following independent, expert advice. Even in its current rudimentary form, A.I. has become a way for a company to evade responsibility by saying that it’s just doing what “the algorithm” says, even though it was the company that commissioned the algorithm in the first place.

Once again, absolutely spot-on analysis from Ted Chiang.

I’m not very convinced by claims that A.I. poses a danger to humanity because it might develop goals of its own and prevent us from turning it off. However, I do think that A.I. is dangerous inasmuch as it increases the power of capitalism. The doomsday scenario is not a manufacturing A.I. transforming the entire planet into paper clips, as one famous thought experiment has imagined. It’s A.I.-supercharged corporations destroying the environment and the working class in their pursuit of shareholder value. Capitalism is the machine that will do whatever it takes to prevent us from turning it off, and the most successful weapon in its arsenal has been its campaign to prevent us from considering any alternatives.

On User Tracking and Industry Standards on Privacy | CSS-Tricks

Prompted by my post on tracking, Chris does some soul searching about his own use of tracking.

I��m interested not just in the ethical concerns and my long-time complacency with industry norms, but also as someone who very literally sells advertising.

He brings up the point that advertisers expect to know how many people opened a particular email and how many people clicked on a particular link. I’m sure that’s right, but it’s also beside the point: what matters is how the receiver of the email feels about having that information tracked. If they haven’t given you permission to do it, you can’t just assume they’re okay with it.

I’ve been reading the excellent Design For Safety by Eva PenzeyMoog. There was a line that really stood out to me:

The idea that it’s alright to do whatever unethical thing is currently the industry norm is widespread in tech, and dangerous.

It stood out to me because I had been thinking about certain practices that are widespread, accepted, and yet strike me as deeply problematic. These practices involve tracking users.

The first problem is that even the terminology I’m using would be rejected. When you track users on your website, it’s called analytics. Or maybe it’s stats. If you track users on a large enough scale, I guess you get to just call it data.

Those words—“analytics”, “stats”, and “data”—are often used when the more accurate word would be “tracking.”

Or to put it another way; analytics, stats, data, numbers …these are all outputs. But what produced these outputs? Tracking.

Here’s a concrete example: email newsletters.

Do you have numbers on how many people opened a particular newsletter? Do you have numbers on how many people clicked a particular link?

You can call it data, or stats, or analytics, but make no mistake, that’s tracking.

Follow-on question: do you honestly think that everyone who opens a newsletter or clicks on a link in a newsletter has given their informed constent to be tracked by you?

You may well answer that this is a widespread—nay, universal—practice. Well yes, but a) that’s not what I asked, and b) see the above quote from Design For Safety.

You could quite correctly point out that this tracking is out of your hands. Your newsletter provider—probably Mailchimp—does this by default. So if the tracking is happening anyway, why not take a look at those numbers?

But that’s like saying it’s okay to eat battery-farmed chicken as long as you’re not breeding the chickens yourself.

When I try to argue against this kind of tracking from an ethical standpoint, I get a frosty reception. I might have better luck battling numbers with numbers. Increasing numbers of users are taking steps to prevent tracking. I had a plug-in installed in my mail client—Apple Mail—to prevent tracking. Now I don’t even need the plug-in. Apple have built it into the app. That should tell you something. It reminds me of when browsers had to introduce pop-up blocking.

If the outputs generated by tracking turn out to be inaccurate, then shouldn’t they lose their status?

But that line of reasoning shouldn’t even by necessary. We shouldn’t stop tracking users because it’s inaccurate. We should stop stop tracking users because it’s wrong.

What is the Web? - Web Directions

To be blunt, I feel we, the folks who have been involved with designing and developing for the web for a significant period of time–including me as I feel a strong sense of personal responsibility here–are in no small part responsible for it falling far short of its promise.

Building accessible websites and apps is a moral obligation | Go Make Things

• Morality is not always relative.
• You’re a web professional.
• The web is accessible out-of-the-box. We break it.
• It’s not on people with disabilities to tell you how you screwed up.
• It should be easier. This is our job.

An Event Apart Seattle was most excellent. This year, the AEA team are trying something different and making each event three days long. That’s a lot of mindblowing content!

What always fascinates me at events like these is the way that some themes seem to emerge, without any prior collusion between the speakers. This time, I felt that there was a strong thread of giving control directly to users:

Sarah and Margot both touched on this when talking about authenticity in brand messaging.

Margot described this in terms of vulnerability for the brand, but the kind of vulnerability that leads to trust.

Sarah talked about it in terms of respect—respecting the privacy of users, and respecting the way that they want to use your services. Call it compassion, call it empathy, or call it just good business sense, but providing these kind of controls in an interface is an excellent long-term strategy.

In Val’s animation talk, she did a deep dive into prefers-reduced-motion, a media query that deliberately hands control back to the user.

Even in a CSS-heavy talk like Jen’s, she took the time to explain why starting with meaningful markup is so important—it’s because you can’t control how the user will access your content. They may use tools like reader modes, or Pocket, or have web pages read aloud to them. The user has the final say, and rightly so.

In his CSS talk, Eric reminded us that a style sheet is a list of strong suggestions, not instructions.

Beth’s talk was probably the most explicit on the theme of returning control to users. She drew on examples from beyond the world of the web—from architecture, urban planning, and more—to show that the most successful systems are not imposed from the top down, but involve everyone, especially those most marginalised.

And even in my own talk on service workers, I raved about the design pattern of allowing users to save pages offline to read later. Instead of trying to guess what the user wants, give them the means to take control.

I was really encouraged to see this theme emerge. Mind you, when I look at the reality of most web products, it’s easy to get discouraged. Far from providing their users with controls over their own content, Instagram won’t even let their customers have a chronological feed. And Matt recently wrote about how both Twitter and Quora are heading further and further away from giving control to their users in his piece called Optimizing for outrage.

Still, I came away from An Event Apart Seattle with a renewed determination to do my part in giving people more control over the products and services we design and develop.

I spent the first two days of the conference trying to liveblog as much as I could. I find it really focuses my attention, although it’s also quite knackering. I didn’t do too badly; I managed to write cover eleven of the talks (out of the conference’s total of seventeen):

1. Slow Design for an Anxious World by Jeffrey Zeldman
2. Designing for Trust in an Uncertain World by Margot Bloomstein
3. Designing for Personalities by Sarah Parmenter
4. Generation Style by Eric Meyer
5. Making Things Better: Redefining the Technical Possibilities of CSS by Rachel Andrew
6. Designing Intrinsic Layouts by Jen Simmons
7. How to Think Like a Front-End Developer by Chris Coyier
8. From Ideation to Iteration: Design Thinking for Work and for Life by Una Kravets
9. Move Fast and Don’t Break Things by Scott Jehl
10. Mobile Planet by Luke Wroblewski
11. Unsolved Problems by Beth Dean

Adding value, by adding values – Public Digital

Ben Terrett on balancing the needs of an individual user with the needs of everyone else.

Of course we care about our clients: we want them to be successful and profitable. But we think there’s a balance to be struck between what success means for just the user or customer, and what success means for society.

I, Maintainer

Maintaining an open source project is a rollercoaster ride with high peaks and very low troughs.

Release frequency is down. Questions increasingly go unanswered. Issues remain in a triage, unresolved state. Uncertainty and frustration brew within the community room.

Brian’s experience with Pattern Lab very much mirrors Mark’s experience with Fractal. The pressure. The stress. But there’s also the community.

A maintainer must keep the needs of their project, their community, and their own needs in constant harmony.

This is hard!

Thinking in Triplicate – Mule Design Studio – Medium

Erika has written a great guest post on Ev’s blog. It covers the meaning, the impact, and the responsibility of design …and how we’ve been chasing the wrong measurements of success.

We design for the experience of a single user at a time and expect that the collective experience, and the collective impact, will take care of itself.

Derek Powazek - AI is Not a Community Management Strategy

A really excellent piece from Derek on the history of community management online.

You have to decide what your platform is for and what it’s not for. And, yeah, that means deciding who it’s for and who it’s not for (hint: it’s not bots, nor nazis). That’s not a job you can outsource. The tech won’t do it for you. Not just because it’s your job, but because outsourcing it won’t work. It never does.

Why Silicon Valley can’t fix itself

Backlash backlash:

The nature of human nature is that it changes. It can not, therefore, serve as a stable basis for evaluating the impact of technology. Yet the assumption that it doesn’t change serves a useful purpose. Treating human nature as something static, pure and essential elevates the speaker into a position of power. Claiming to tell us who we are, they tell us how we should be.

Fantasies of the Future: Design in a World Being Eaten by Software / Paul Robert Lloyd

The transcript of a terrific talk by Paul, calling for a more thoughtful, questioning approach to digital design. It covers the issues I’ve raised about Booking.com’s dark patterns and a post I linked to a while back about the shifting priorities of designers working at scale.

Drawing inspiration from architectural practice, its successes and failures, I question the role of design in a world being eaten by software. When the prevailing technocratic culture permits the creation of products that undermine and exploit users, who will protect citizens within the digital spaces they now inhabit?

“Please keep politics out of your talk.” – The future is like pie.

I recently received this very instruction about speaking at an upcoming event. I honestly don’t know how I could talk about universality, progressive enhancement, and user experience without it being political. So I interpreted the request to be about partisanship rather than politics:

Sometimes when people hear the term “political,” they understand it as “partisan.” To be political is to acknowledge the lived experiences of people outside of yourself. To be partisan is to advocate for the beliefs or propaganda of a specific party affiliation.

No one’s coming. It’s up to us. – Dan Hon – Medium

A terrific piece by Dan Hon on our collective responsibility. This bit, in particular, resonated with me: it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately:

We are better and stronger when we are together than when we are apart. If you’re a technologist, consider this question: what are the pros and cons of unionizing? As the product of a linked network, consider the question: what is gained and who gains from preventing humans from linking up in this way?

Subverted Design

It’s ironic, isn’t it? Design is more important and respected than ever, which means we have more agency to affect change. But at the same time, our priorities have been subverted, pushed towards corporate benefit over human benefit. It’s hard to reconcile those things.

Legends of the Ancient Web

An absolutely fantastic talk (as always) from Maciej, this time looking at the history of radio and its parallels with the internet (something that Tom Standage touched on his book, Writing On The Wall). It starts as a hobbyist, fun medium. Then it gets regulated. Then it gets used to reinforce existing power structures.

It is hard to accept that good people, working on technology that benefits so many, with nothing but good intentions, could end up building a powerful tool for the wicked.

Against an Increasingly User-Hostile Web - Neustadt.fr

With echoes of Anil Dash’s The Web We Lost, this essay is a timely reminder—with practical advice—for we designers and developers who are making the web …and betraying its users.

You see, the web wasn’t meant to be a gated community. It’s actually pretty simple.

A web server, a public address and an HTML file are all that you need to share your thoughts (or indeed, art, sound or software) with anyone in the world. No authority from which to seek approval, no editorial board, no publisher. No content policy, no dependence on a third party startup that might fold in three years to begin a new adventure.

That’s what the web makes possible. It’s friendship over hyperlink, knowledge over the network, romance over HTTP.

Be proud to be a web developer — yatil. Eric Eggert about web development

An ever-timely call-to-arms from Eric:

Sir Tim Berners-Lee envisioned the web as open and accessible for everyone, no matter where they comes from, what speed their connection is, how capable their browsers are or how good their eyes or hands or both work. I feel proud every day to make that vision reality, and it is the job of web developers to make it a reality.

He’s right. We have tremendous power and privilege, and correspondingly tremendous responsibility.