In the second episode of this series, Katie is joined by Adam Landes, a product manager for an FMCG company. In this episode, they discuss what sustainable and ethical design truly means for businesses when they build digital products.

What are the ethical considerations to take into account? What impact does it have on their users? Listen now to learn more about this insightful topic. 

00:02

Welcome to MoorBytes, a short -form podcast brought to you by Moorhouse. In each episode, we'll be discussing trends and insights we really care about and breaking these down into digestible chunks.

00:16

In this first series, we'll be taking a deep dive into the often complex but always fascinating relationship between digital and sustainability. Welcome to our next episode of Moorbytes. We'll be joined by Ex -Moorhouser Adam Landes, now product lead at a leading FMCG.

00:34

Together, we'll be navigating the ethical frontier of tech through products, taking a deep dive into the exciting world of ethical product design, considering all elements of ESG. Welcome, Adam. Hi Katie.

00:48

This is a really important topic for any business which owns, operates, designs their digital products. But for those who don't know, Adam, please can you give us a one -liner on what we mean by digital products and ethical design?

01:01

Sure. So we're referring to how digital products design, built, delivered and maintained in a manner which takes into account the ethical impacts that it has on users as well as being designed and built in a sustainable manner.

01:15

And to showcase what this might mean in fact, could you give us an example of a digital product that maybe most of us can relate to? Yeah, so a good example is, for instance, an app that you might use to do your food shop.

01:28

So when you're designing such an app or products, things like making your links text descriptive, not just conveying information using only colour, factor in the use of larger font settings and kind of meeting accessibility requirements.

01:43

Thanks for that introduction. Great to bring this topic to life a little bit more. I think it's clear that a lot of people use digital products in their daily lives, but actually probably don't spend a lot of time thinking about the development behind them.

01:58

So with this in mind, can we chat a bit about... what sustainable and ethical design actually means when we're building the products we use, like what would be the ethical considerations on the back end.

02:10

Yeah so there's kind of three areas that we probably want to focus on. There's optimised resource utilisation, so the building of products and applications is very resource intensive activity, so you need to take into account things like your storage, your energy consumption and your compute power.

02:29

Second area being writing efficient code, so most digital products you're writing code, you know the underlying software you need to make sure that that remains valuable through regular updates, ensure that you're practically focusing on reducing your tech debt.

02:44

It's very easy to build digital products and solutions focused on solving certain business problems or like the urgent need of certain user groups, but products should be designed in a more kind of holistic fashion.

02:56

and the the third area here is that ensuring that your products are scalable and flexible and that they meet changing needs so they can handle increased workloads and accommodate new features without requiring significant amounts of rework.

03:08

So if we think about those three factors that's obviously a great step towards creating a digital product which is more ethical and sustainable both from that environmental perspective but also from the social side.

03:22

Can we just touch on the G of ESG governance and what other considerations a company might be thinking about here? Yeah so you want to think about kind of aligns with kind of legislative considerations as well.

03:37

A range of Moorhouse's clients work in highly regulated and data sensitive industries. So we have experience of ensuring that products and solutions are built to meet data and user privacy requirements ensure they align with cyber security and kind of compliance with right wider government wrecks.

03:55

I think particularly within that data and user privacy is obviously quite a hot topic you know we've seen a spate of data breaches and privacy scandals for a range of organisations. There could be lots of reasons why this happens but you know it's a shared responsibility that starts at kind of products and design and build stages and making sure keep a focus on it as you go through kind of ongoing maintenance and security considerations for products.

04:19

I think as well just looking at it more broadly from a legislative perspective so the European Parliament has recently announced the adoption of a report according to the European Commission to introduce new legislation on digital addiction so kind of looking at stopping addictive product design which obviously impacts lots of different user groups.

04:39

And has anything caught your attention recently in terms of a trailblazer of ethical product design? Yes there are some like really great examples there of some really large companies making big changes to ensure that ethical considerations are incorporated into their products

04:56

and some smaller changes as well that caught my eye. So at a larger system tech provider, they are working to ensure that their algorithms in their biometric solutions are designed to be as accurate and neutral as possible by submitting their algorithms to independent bodies for testing and assessment.

05:16

Intel have filed a patent application for a system that recognises social biases in AI models by calculating the likelihood that visual data sets contain images that reflect those biases. And then just more on a kind of a day -to -day basis and something that we've all seen is great to see that most mobile phones and tablet companies are making screen -time widgets, the use of grayscale, time -out on certain apps,

05:41

so much easier for users to adopt. It kind of takes us back to that European Parliament point around, you know, making sure we're not designing our products in a manner that's addictive. Thanks Adam.

05:54

I think that's really interesting especially seeing how the legislation around digital addiction has been translated into product design and I'm sure that's relatable for so many people with the apps that they use.

06:07

Hopefully the rest of what is being said is resonating and you might be acknowledging that you own a digital product or you manage a product team. You might already have an app out for user testing already and you might be wanting to integrate ESG into your product design a bit more.

06:24

What would be the starting point here? I think there's a few areas to consider here. UX UI designers have a responsibility to put users that heart the design process so product should be easy to use and can cater for diverse or cater to diverse user groups.

06:40

Bringing cyber and security teams early, the protection of user data, user consent of data, robust security measures are really important and a lot of the responsibility falls on that product manager, product owner, person.

06:55

They need to be kind of upfront with the users and customers on product functionality and data usage as this is vital in building trust with the users. There's a lot to consider. It's really hard to get all of this right first time so that benefit of that product based delivery approach where you work iteratively and agile is that you can have those user feedback loops and you can take user feedback and ensure that you're designing and constantly building and refining your products to make sure that there's no unintended consequences of what you're building and releasing.

07:27

Why do we need to do this? Obviously there's the legislative and the regulatory side of things but also it builds more user trust. It builds more loyalty which could mean more product engagement, more sales, more trust in your company, in your brand and competitiveness in your markets.

07:45

Thanks Adam for that whistle stop tour of sustainable products. Thank you for having me Katie. We've touched on what we mean by ethical digital products, the implications and practicalities of sustainable builds, and the latest legislation guiding this.

08:05

We've highlighted some of the trailblazers in this field, and what we can learn from them in terms of sustainable product design. I hope this has provided you your starter for 10 on this topic, but any questions you may have, please get in touch with the team.

08:19

Join us for our next episode, where we'll be exploring all things sustainability and the cloud. Is it everything it's cracked up to be?