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Ethical Design
How do design projects, prioritize user privacy, security and well-being and is the designer responsible for this?
Being acknowledged and aware of self-development and growth is a main trend of our generation. We should constantly work on ourselves and our mindset to succeed, to be in time with the world, and basically to be happy living this life. And apps, we spend time with: from messengers to websites where we order food, influence our feeling of aesthetics, our mood, and our lifestyle a lot.
Did you notice how significantly the number of mental health posters on Instagram increased? Did you notice, how many cafes and restaurants reworked their websites to make them cleaner and more modern? This is an effect of the “user-centered digital era”. Self-love and care about your comfort are what we are all about and what designers bring responsibility for in the modern world.
The user should definitely stand in the first place. And this is reflected in all modern digital trends: from gamification to make even sushi-ordering fun and joyful and up to jewelry shopping when users are choosing items depending on their mood and eye color. Everything is about you, how you are unique in your own way, and how you prioritize yourself. Speaking in other words, there is a great possibility that digitalization has actually started this marathon for self-love since all good UI/UX stands on the user in the center of everything.
How to Make Interface Yours?
However, while the trend is set and it’s important to support it from now on, we need to consider the growing demands of the interfaces. First of all, this may be considered personalization, which appears to be an obligatory set-up for any mobile app nowadays. Personalization allows inputting your personal data on onboarding or while creating an account to make an app more like you and not just like a cool app.
The second trend is to make a user plan “supermarket-like” when the user can add required features to the cart and set a plan for it. Such a level of customization can be seen rarely, however many apps instead offer highly-customizable and various plans, that make people feel like the app was made really different to meet their needs.
Another chance to make an app more custom is a chance to play with its design — it won’t work for all applications, but still, it turns an app into your personal space, where only you can be the main character.
Of course, with the quick growth of data and with the bigger trust in digital sources we need to make sure the app is completely secured — for this it is important to work on two-step verification and make sure you use modern security technologies, so people know their data is safe. Otherwise, it simply won’t work.
