Privacy and design ethics vs designing for curiosity, communication and children: Lessons learned

Paper in proceeding, 2018

Publication rights licensed to ACM. This paper describes the lessons learned when designing an empathy-oriented image-exchange app for fifth-grade pupils. The aim was to evoke curiosity and empathy towards someone living elsewhere or under different socio-economic circumstances. In addition, we strived to apply design ethics (e.g. protecting users from insults, humiliation, inappropriate content etc) and take users' privacy into account. By setting up these boundaries for this user group we found ourselves confronted with a set of conflicting design decisions which ultimately led to a lesser and different user experience than we had expected. Here, we discuss the interplay between our design decisions and the consequences thereof, and evaluate the mistakes we made. Moreover we discuss how to balance anonymity and curiosity, and comment on the benefits of making a pre-analysis of potential clashes related to intended UX and other core design decisions.