Principles for building products that are good for the world

More and more businesses are benefitting from the realization that consumers and employees alike want to engage with, follow, and work for brands with positive social missions and products and services that do no harm. As product and service professionals we need a common set of tools to help align our creations and our teams towards good. These are a set of principles that can be used as heuristics when building, evaluating, or governing products and services. These principles focus less on the functional or usability aspects designers are used to and more on the morality, ethics, and impact those products can have on the world and the people that use them.

It's not a prerequisite, but if you're familiar with Jakob Nielsen’s 10 general principles for interaction design, or Bruce Tognazzini’s First Principles of Interaction Design, common principles that folks like product designers use to both evaluate products and services or guide their own work, you can use these principles just like you do those.

My hope is that this helps further conversation and causes product and service people everywhere to consider the greater morality and ethics of the things we are releasing out into the world and the resonating impact and outcomes those products may have. Similar to a doctor taking the hippocratic oath, we designers have a responsibility to uphold a certain level of character and influence our work with the values we want to see in the world.

Principles

Accessibility

The system should be usable by those with varied abilities, devices, or connection.

Diversity

The system should invite diversity of personal identities, ideas, perspectives, and backgrounds.

Equity

The system should recognize and make accommodations for users approaching the system from different levels of expertise and varied backgrounds so that they have the same opportunity to grow, contribute, and develop the system as other users.

Belonging

The system should ensure all users feel equally comfortable to connect and contribute.

Inclusion

The system should promote a culture of inclusion that embraces everyone’s differences and involves all voices.

Privacy

The system should respect users right to be forgotten, disclaim, warn, and ask for consent to collect, use, or store, the user’s information.

Security

The system should promote the wellness of, and not jeopardize the user’s physical, mental, spiritual, or financial security.

Safety

The system should ensure and promote psychological, emotional, mental, and physical safety of its users whenever possible, and provide the means for them to seek aid, justice, or remedy, upon an incident.

Stigma & Bias

The system should not promote and instead seek to identify, combat, and rectify incidents of discrimination, stigma, bias, misinformation, fear, and false narratives that may be caused, facilitated by, or promoted by the system.

User Health

The system should encourage healthy habits of its users and not seek to addict them to the system.

False Obsolescence

The system should not be planned or designed as a product with an artificially limited useful life or a purposely frail design that causes it to become obsolete after a certain pre-determined period of time.

Honesty & Truth

The system should seek to promote objective truth and rectify instances when misinformation may be caused or spread by the system or its users.