Ethics in HCI - Molar

CHI2001 Panel Documentation

Ethics in HCI ABSTRACT

BACKGROUND

Users are human. As HCI professionals we must be sure that our fellow humans perceive their encounter with usability and design professionals as pleasant without sacrificing the accuracy of our results. There are guidelines produced by professional organizations like the APA and the ACM about how HCI professionals should behave. However, there are few examples from real life about how to translate this information into everyday behavior. This panel will discuss specific examples of HCI dilemmas that the panelists have faced in their daily work.

Ethical issues permeate our profession, but there are relatively few public discussions of these issues, perhaps because they are uncomfortable for many practitioners. A quick survey of the ACM Digital library on topics showing the key word ethics produced 69 hits with only about 3 articles focusing on the concerns of HCI practitioners.

Keywords

Ethics, HCI professional issues, social computing. PANELISTS

Brenda Laurel Art Center College of Design Email: [email protected] Carolyn Snyder Snyder Consulting 88 Brookwood Drive Salem, NH 03079, USA Email: [email protected]

Our belief is that internal participants should be afforded equal (or perhaps greater) protection than external participants, even to the extent of promising that their tape will not be shown to anyone other than the HCI team. A key ethical tenet is that the participant should leave a test feeling no worse than when they arrived and ideally should feel better because they learned something, or contributed to a better design.

Whitney Quesenbery Cognetics Corporation 51 Everett Drive #103B PO Box 386 Princeton Junction, NJ 08829, USA Email: [email protected] Chauncey E. Wilson Bentley College Email: [email protected]

Anonymity Field studies often present HCI colleagues with ethical dilemmas. For example, a HCI colleague can sometimes find it difficult to preserve anonymity (and confidentiality) while at the same time providing feedback to customers on the results of field studies. Customers often want to hear about the results of field studies and some may even demand to know as a condition for allowing interviews. How do you respond to a senior vice president who asks you “How did Fred do with the new product?” If your visit focuses on only a few users and you promised a report on your visit, how do you insure that the anonymity of the feedback is not compromised?

Rolf Molich DialogDesign Skovkrogen 3 DK-3660 Stenlose, Denmark Email: [email protected] PANEL ORGANIZER

Rolf Molich Contact information above.

CHI2001 Panel Proposal

Informed consent and User Self-Esteem Consider a simple example, the use of videotape in usability and field studies. Wendy Mackay, in one of the few papers specific to the HCI community [4], wrote of how easy it is to compromise our integrity when we employ video (or audio) to present our results and influence others. For example, a question that Mackay asks is “do we need to have internal participants who have already signed an employee agreement about being videotaped also sign a consent form?” Many HCI colleagues forego the consent form for internal participants, but this is probably an ethical violation since a video of an internal person doing poorly on a task could affect his/her reputation at work.

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There are several methods to insure anonymity: put in writing the conditions of the visit and make sure that this is a prominent topic in preparations and planning. You can also say that there will be an aggregate report from several different customers, but that no individuals will be identified. Data Integrity and Presentation The manner in which we report the results of product evaluations presents some interesting ethical issues for HCI practitioners. Since we have to work with product teams, there may be a tendency to soft pedal bad results to preserve a working relationship with that team. The ability to simultaneously present bad results and keep good relationships is a difficult skill to learn but is important if we are to fulfill the user advocate role. Mackay [4] discusses how highlight tapes can be “doctored” by omitting particular segments or by making “rare events appear representative”. A final ethical issue in reporting is the validity and reliability of the data. At the 2000 UPA conference, a group of HCI practitioners discussed how few usability reports address validity and reliability, even at the most basic level. Are we being sloppy (and perhaps unethical) in presenting usability reports that fail to address fundamental aspects of data integrity? Undue Persuasion The design of persuasive technologies presents some ethical issues for HCI designers. [3] highlights ethical principles for the design of persuasive technologies. Here are two examples from their list: • Rule VII: “Persuasive technologies must not misinform in order to achieve their persuasive end.” • Rule VIII: “The creators of a persuasive technology should never seek to persuade a person or persons of something they themselves would not consent to be persuaded to do.” As HCI colleagues, what do we do when confronted with knowledge that a product may misinform potential users or persuade them to do something outrageous? Do we remind our managers of these ethical issues, quit the company, or write an expose that may land us in court? Life and Death Ethical issues can become complex when people are working on systems that might have life or death consequences. For example, designers of medical hardware and software make decisions that may compromise the health of an individual. Is it ethical to follow the advice that


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5-8 users will reveal the major problems of a product? Testing 5-8 users is much cheaper than testing large numbers so there is a trade-off of time-to-market with possibility of death because a subtle problem did not come out in the limited testing. Pushing Back on Management Pushing back on management when there are ethical issues (especially the less obvious ones) is hard for experienced practitioners and almost impossible for the brand-new person in the field. We view this panel as the starting point for a vigorous and continuing discussion about how we can keep high levels of integrity while working in product development environments that can bend ethical boundaries. INTRODUCTION TO PANEL

There are plenty of guidelines for proper conduct around [1,2]. Some of the popular Human Factors textbooks contain sections on ethics in HCI, for example [5]. However, it appears that these guidelines are relatively unknown. We offer the following possible reasons for this: • The guidelines are written in a language that is hard to understand. • The guidelines are difficult to locate. • There are few (if any) examples of how these principles are applied in practice. • Some of the guidelines mostly deal with usability testing and handling of videotapes. These, of course, are important details, but ethical dilemmas extend far beyond usability lab practices into all phases of product design. We don’t think HCI needs another code of ethics. What we do need instead is a collection of case studies illustrating the ethical concerns other HCI professionals have been struggling with. Ethics should be a part of any formal training – graduate classes, seminars by professionals, etc. HCI professionals face ethical issues every day. Here are some examples that could form the basis for a set of case studies. First a few simple ones: • You go into the field. You have told your interviewees that their comments to you are private. A senior VP asks you “who did well in the study?” What do you say? Answer: You can’t give any answer that reveals or even narrows down the identity of an interviewee, no matter who is asking - a promise is a promise.

Ethics in HCI

• A usability test center entertains visitors by showing video clips with “funny” episodes from usability tests where test participants are picking their noses, etc. Here are some more subtle examples: • Your usability studies show that a product is not usable. Marketing folks claim that it is really usable. Do you email the CEO and lay your job on the line? • You are aware that a product you are working on is using some technology that someone has patented (there are lots of GUI patents now). Do you make a stink? Talk to your boss and ask him to talk to others? • You learn that your company wants to acquire a company for some GUI technology, but you know from reading and reviewing an evaluation copy of the product that the technology is really pretty poor and even unreliable. Do you make a stink about this or let it pass until others discover they have wasted $10,000,000 on clunky technology that they will write off in less than a year? As HCI professionals we cannot deny responsibility for the products of our work. We cannot defer responsibility to the decision makers, the managers and business sponsors that define the objectives of the system. We are responsible for ensuring that ethical issues in product development are discussed openly and not hidden away in bureaucratic closets. FORMAT OF PANEL

Our aim is to show the diversity of ethical problems in HCI through examples that members of the audience can relate to, and to give attendees an experience they could not get by reading articles or proceedings, or by surfing the web. We will discuss real dilemmas that the panelists have faced during their professional career although some details may have been changed to avoid identification of the innocent/guilty. The panel will focus on dilemmas whose solutions are nontrivial and where substantial arguments can be presented both for and against a particular action. Where appropriate, we will involve all of the audience in a final “vote” where members of the audience will be able to show their personal opinion on the dilemma by waving yellow or blue sheets of paper. Timetable: • Introduction to panel. The panel theme and format is briefly introduced by the panel organizer. Panelists are


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briefly introduced by the organizer using one slide per panelist (5 minutes). The organizer takes a quick vote of the audience to see how many people are familiar with existing ethical guidelines. • Presentation of dilemmas (5 dilemmas @ 15 minutes). Each panelist will present one dilemma using one or two slides. The presentation will be followed by a brief discussion where one or two other panelists contribute their opinion. We will then allow for comments from the audience and take a quick vote to survey the attitude of the audience. • Concluding remarks from the panelists (10 minutes) Some of the panelists will have extra dilemmas ready for discussion if time permits. ETHICAL DILEMMAS Brenda Laurel

Dilemma 1: Your client wants to build an inclusive online community. Your research shows that strong, coherent communities invariably possess means for the group to set boundaries and exclude some people from membership. Do you argue that the client needs to provide for exclusion and boundary-setting in order to make its online community successful? Yes: It is usually a better design decision to accommodate human characteristics than to try to change them. This particular need for boundary-setting by communities is so strong that ignoring it will insure failure. No: The desire to exclude is part of the dark side of human nature. A humanistic approach seeks to improve human character. The client can make an inclusive community so attractive that it will override exclusionary impulses. Dilemma 2: Your client asks you to determine through user testing an optimal shooter interface for an online game targeted to teens and adults. In the design of your research, you have the opportunity to define the “optimal” interface as productive of pleasure and excitement, or as a realistic representation of doing violent harm to another person. Do you choose pleasure over realism? Yes: The clients wants a game, not a simulation. Everyone knows that shooter games are not the same as reality, and they should not be measured by the same standards.

Ethics in HCI

No: The only way around the accusation that shooter games encourage violence is to be sure that they portray violent actions and their consequences realistically.

No: You don’t want to step on any toes, either at the client or the design firm. If they’ve said no to something, you shouldn’t do it, even if you can do it without charging them extra.

Carolyn Snyder

Whitney Quesenbery

Dilemma 1: You’ve found some problems in usability testing. While none are critical, you feel that several are important and you’d like to see them fixed before release. Because the development schedule is extremely tight, only high-priority changes are being made.

Dilemma 1: You have set up early usability tests of a paper prototype with nurses at a medical facility. The test was difficult to schedule because nurses’ time is guarded carefully and marketing carefully guards the relationship with customers. The nursing managers insist on “taking the test” themselves first, and then on being present in the room during the tests with the other participants to “be sure they do it right.” You believe that the managers’ presence will be intimidating to the nurses, altering the results of the test. Do you continue with the usability tests?

Yes: You have a responsibility to make the product as usable as possible under a situation of serious resource constraints. Without bluffing, you’ll accomplish nothing. No: Bluffing will damage your credibility with the team, lessening the chance that they’ll listen to you next time. Besides, you don’t feel quite right about it.

Dilemma 2: Participants in a usability test have given written consent to have the session videotaped for internal company purposes. They are not explicitly told that some unknown number of people will be watching the live video from the observation and control rooms. Are the live observers covered by the consent form? Yes: Consenting to being videotaped includes implicit permission to be observed live. No: The participant may trust that any uncomfortable moments captured on the tape will not be shown to others, but with live action there’s no way to prevent this. Also, people in a non-public setting have a right to know exactly who is watching them. Dilemma 3: You’re a usability consultant brought in to test a web site. The web site is being designed and developed by a third company. The testing reveals some usability problems. You have some ideas for solutions that you’ve seen work in other sites. You ask your client whether she wants you to include your recommendations in your final report. She says they’ve hired the design firm to solve the problems, so you should stick to documenting the findings. Do you include your recommendations? Yes: The client doesn’t necessarily speak for the design firm, and you are in a position to help them do their job better. You are serving a higher purpose – the client’s ultimate success - by passing along whatever wisdom you can offer.


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Yes: If you turn down this opportunity to work with users, it might be impossible to set up a test in the future. Although you would have to carefully evaluate the test results for bias caused by the managers, you will still get valuable comments on the concepts in the prototype. No: Putting the nurses into a situation where they are being asked to react and comment freely in front of their obviously critical managers would be so stressful as to be unethical. You should find a way to avoid running these tests. Dilemma 2: You are the leader of a group developing user interface design standards to promote consistency and usability among your company's products. You have been working with this group for several months and have what you consider a solid set of standards published and accepted, despite some initial resistance to the concept of either standardization or usability. Several products are close to release with new versions incorporating your standards. You are working with a new product group and discover a problem in the standards. You can think of a work-around that will enable them to stay in compliance, but realize that it would be better to modify the standard to take this new information into account. The change would require substantial modification to the earlier products. It is unlikely that you will be able to make this change in the future. Do you change the standards? Yes: Like design, developing standards is an iterative process. The newest product to use the standards

Ethics in HCI

exposed new information and flaws should be corrected to make all of the user interfaces stronger. No: Because you have a valid work-around, practical expediencies should rule. Sometimes good ideas or critical information come too late. Chauncey Wilson

Dilemma 1: You are a manager of a HCI group at a major software company. Your latest product is almost through the beta process and is getting good reviews. At the very last customer visit, a potential scalability problem is observed. Later, in discussions with a trusted technical source, you come to believe that this scalability issue (which is not related to the UI work that your team has done) could have catastrophic consequences for large (but not small or medium) customers. The next day is sign-off for the product and everyone's large bonus depends on a unanimous sign-off that day. The director of the project goes around the room asking each manager if the product is ready and they all reply “YES”. Then it is your turn. You stand to lose a $10,000 bonus. Do you bring up the potential defect and ask for a delay in the product until you confirm your suspicions? Yes: You don't deserve a bonus for shipping an unusable product. This sort of incentive is inherently unethical for exactly this reason – it’s a conflict of interest. No: The product defect is not of your making and you will not be blamed for it when large customers start complaining loudly. The company will fix the problem in the future. The company philosophy is that time-to-market is more important than last minute flaws that will hurt revenues. The company has survived similar problems in the past. Rolf Molich

Dilemma 1: In a press interview about the usability of bank websites a usability expert strongly criticizes the user interface of the website of a certain bank. Among other things he states that the website contains features that are otherwise “only found in porn websites”. The expert later confesses off-the-record that his critical remarks were based solely on his personal opinions, not on usability tests. Is this behavior ethical? Yes. The fact that the remarks are based on opinion instead of usability testing isn’t relevant. In this field, we are often asked to make judgments without having collected any empirical data.


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No. The comparison is intended to embarrass the bank while making the usability expert seem witty and hip. It is a lack of professionalism and evidence of the person’s immaturity. Serious attacks on the usability of other people’s work should be based on users’ findings. The usability expert reduces HCI to an opinion war where the person with the hippest and most loudly voiced opinions wins. Dilemma 2: Your startup company is usability testing online versions of several competing e-commerce bookstores to gather usability data for your own website. To make the tests as realistic as possible, you want to ask test participants to place real orders on the website using their own credit card. Provided that you reimburse test participants in full for all their expenses, is it ok to ask them to reveal information about their credit card? Yes. We really need the diversity of the data that will result from using diversified credit cards and diversified personal addresses. We also need to test complete, realistic sales. There’s nothing secret about a credit card number. You can publish your credit card number on the front page of the New York Times, if you wish. Inform the test participant well before the test that s/he will be using his/her own credit card and excuse them immediately if they hesitate. No. The facilitator must ask the test participant to use the facilitator’s credit card or stop the test when the website asks for credit card information. The real issue isn't budgeting and reimbursement – it’s privacy and potential legal exposure. Think about it... the users will be coming to an unknown company, and then a nice lady asks them to disclose their credit card number while she takes copious notes. Sounds like a scam to me! PANELIST DETAILS

Brenda Laurel is a member of the Graduate Faculty, Media Design Program, Art Center College of Design. Brenda is a usability expert specializing in interactive entertainment for the last 25 years. She is best known as co-founder and chief designer of Purple Moon, a company formed to develop interactive products for girls. Purple Moon arose from Laurel's work at Interval Research Corporation, where she coordinated research activities exploring gender, culture and technology. Laurel is the editor of “The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design,” and author of “Computers as Theatre” and numerous other seminal

Ethics in HCI

papers and articles on interactive narrative, virtual environments and experience design. Carolyn Snyder is an independent usability consultant with more than 17 years of experience in the software industry. She works with development teams to make their websites and software more usable. Before starting Snyder Consulting in March 1999, Carolyn was a principal consultant at User Interface Engineering, one of the country’s leading usability consulting firms. During her 6year tenure there, she worked with dozens of high-tech clients, specializing in paper prototyping and usability testing. Carolyn is co-author of Web Site Usability: A Designer’s Guide. Whitney Quesenbery is a lead interface designer at Cognetics Corporation. She is one of the developers of LUCID (Logical User-Centered Interaction Design), a framework for managing the design and evaluation of the user interface. Her projects with Cognetics have included designs for clients such as Shared Medical Systems, Novartis, Gerber, Deloitte Consulting, Hewlett-Packard, Macmillan, IDX and Lucent. Whitney is the Manager of the STC Usability SIG.

REFERENCES

The following list describes references quoted in the text. An extensive bibliography follows this panel outline. 1. ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Task Force on Software Engineering Ethics and Professional Practices. Software engineering code of ethics and professional practice. Available at http://www.acm.org/serving/se/code.htm 2. American Psychological Association (APA). Ethical principles of psychologists and code of conduct. Available at http://www.apa.org/ethics/code.html 3. Berdichevsky, D., and Neuenschwander, E. Towards an ethics of persuasive technology. Commun. ACM 42, 5 (May 1999), 51-58. 4. Mackay, W.E. Ethics, Lies and Videotape, in Proceedings of CHI ’95 (Denver CO, May 1995), ACM Press, 138-145. 5. Nielsen, J. Usability Engineering. Academic Press, San Diego CA, 1993.

Chauncey Wilson has is director of the Bentley College Design and Usability Testing Center. Chauncey has been a product line development manager at BMC Software, Inc. for two years. He has been an HCI architect and usability engineer for IDX Corporation, FTP Software, Dun & Bradstreet Software, Human Factors International and Digital Equipment Corporation. Chauncey co-authored a chapter (with Dennis Wixon) on Usability Engineering in the Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction. In the 1980s Chauncey chaired an ethics and experimental design panel at the Army Human Engineering Laboratory. Rolf Molich owns and manages DialogDesign, a small Danish usability consultancy (www.dialogdesign.dk). Rolf conceived and coordinated the comparative usability evaluation study CUE-2 where 9 usability labs tested the same application. Rolf was a principal investigator in the NN/group’s recent large scale usability test of 20 US ecommerce websites. Rolf has worked with usability since 1984; he is the co-inventor of the heuristic inspection method (with Jakob Nielsen), and he is the author of the best-selling Danish book “User friendly computer systems”, of which almost 20,000 copies have been sold. Right from the first edition in 1986 this book has contained a section on ethics.


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Ethics in HCI

CHI2001 Panel Documentation

Sources of Information on Computer and HCI Ethics Collected by Chauncey Wilson

http://anastasi.apa.org/draftethicscode/draftcode.cfm#toc

Bannon describes some of his personal experiences with privacy on computer-mediated workspaces. Ethical issues involved in videotape, ubiquitous computing, collaborative environments, and audio taping of phone calls (a legal issues in many states).

American Psychological Association (APA) Ethics Code (1992)

Ethics of Computers That Persuade by B. J. Fogg, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA.

http://www.apa.org/ethics/code.html

http://hci.stanford.edu/captology/moreinfo/ethics.html

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct

Fogg gives a brief introduction to the ethics of persuasive computing. He discusses the ethics of persuasive computers and the ethics of studying people who use persuasive computing systems.

ETHICAL PRINCIPLES FROM PROFESSIONAL SOCIETIES

American Psychological Association (APA) Ethics Code Draft for Comment

http://www.acm.org/constitution/code.html

Australian Computer Society (ACS) Code of Ethics

Computer Ethics: Future Directions by Dr John Weckert, Sturt University, Australia, 2000.

http://www.acs.org.au/national/pospaper/acs131.htm

http://www.acs.org.au/act/events/2000acs4.html Online Articles

Galilean Nemesis: Notes on Video Ethics in HCI by Bob Anderson, Rank Xerox Ltd, 1998. http://www.rxrc.xerox.com/publis/cam-trs/html/epc-1998107.htm

This paper discusses the ethics of video collection from several theoretical perspectives. Anderson focuses on similarities and differences between informed consent and data usage in medical and psychology experiments. He notes that getting participants to agree to allow video data beforehand present an ethical issue since the person cannot know what the video will actually reveal beforehand. The Ethics of Research into Invasive Technologies by Bob Anderson, Rank Xerox Ltd, 1991. http://www.rxrc.xerox.com/publis/cam-trs/html/epc-1991107.htm

Anderson discusses various ethical frames of reference (utilitarianism for example) are appropriate for condoning research practices with invasive computer technologies. Privacy-related Issues in Computer-Mediated Spaces by Liam J. Bannon, Dept. of Computer Science & Information Systems, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland, 1994.

A wide ranging discussion of ethical questions including: • How easy should we make our systems (should we build in challenges)? • How much focus should we put on accessibility? • What are some of the ethical issues with global computing? Intelligent Agents: Some Ethical Issues and Dilemmas by Carolyn Dowling, Australian Catholic University, Australia, 2000. http://www.aice.swin.edu.au/events/AICE2000/papers/dow.pdf

Dowling describes some of the ethical issues in the design of agents. Her paper focuses mostly on delegation, trust, and autonomy. Compendium of Links on Human and Ethical Issues. http://www.compapp.dcu.ie/~roconnor/modules/isf/chapter7.h tml

Ethics, Lies, and Videotape… by Wendy E. Mackay, Rank Xerox, Cambridge, UK, 1995 http://www.acm.org/sigchi/chi95/proceedings/papers/wem1bdy .htm

(requires ACM Digital Library registration)

http://www.ul.ie/~idc/library/papersreports/LiamBannon/25/C SCW94.html


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Ethics in HCI

Usability Testing: Revisiting Informed Consent Procedures for Testing Internet Sites by O. K. Burmeister. 2000. http://www.aice.swin.edu.au/events/AICE2000/papers/bur2.pdf

Schrier, J. R. Reducing Stress Associated with Participating in a Usability Test. Proceedings of the Human Factors Society 36th Annual Meeting. 1992, v.2, p.1210-1214.

World-Wide CHI: Future Ethics by by John Karat and Clare-Marie Karat.

Columns

http://www.acm.org/sigchi/bulletin/1997.1/international.html

This is a short article in the SIGCHI Bulletin for January 1997. The article discusses issues raised in the book: Ethics of Computing; Codes, Spaces for Discussion and Law, edited by Profs. Jacques Berleur and Klaus Brunnstein.

Cohen, R. The Ethicist. A Column in The New York Times Sunday Magazine. www.nytimes.com (requires registration).

Ethical Issues of Medical Records on the Internet by M. L. Mick and S. E. Conners. 1997. http://www.math.luc.edu/ethics97/papers/MickConners.html

Online Experiments: Ethically Fair or Foul? By B. Azar. APA Monitor Volume 31(4), April 2000. http://www.apa.org/monitor/apr00/fairorfoul.html

Ethical and Legal Issues of Human Subjects Research on the Internet. A Report of an AAAS Program on Scientific Freedom Workshop. Washington, DC, 1999 http://www.aaas.org/spp/dspp/sfrl/projects/intres/report.pdf Books and Hardcopy Articles

Berleur, J. and Brunnstein, K. (Eds.) Ethics of Computing; Codes, Spaces for Discussion and Law. Chapman & Hall, 1997. This book was discussed in the November 1997 SIGCHI Bulletin. The book compares 30 different codes of ethics. Bowyer, K. W. Ethics and Computing Living Responsibly in a Computerized World (Second Edition). IEEE Press: Piscataway, NJ, 2001. Johnson, D. G. and H. Nissenbaum. Computers, Ethics, and Social Values. Prentice-Hall: 1995. Raskin, J. Wanted for Crimes Against the Interface: Thoughts on an HCI Poster. Interactions. November/December, 1996. ACM: p. 70-76. Raskin makes a point at the end of the article that we, UI designers are often forced to capitulate on what is the best design, sometimes for fear of losing our job or irritating those that manage design. Raskin asks if there is some ethical code that “…supports us in refusing to do what we know is wrong without fearing for our jobs?”


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SOURCES OF INFORMATION ON MEDICAL ETHICS

Links collected by Francie Fleek

Also related pages on computers and other ethical areas http://commfaculty.fullerton.edu/lester/ethics/ethics_list.html

Online Articles

Human Error: Designing for Error in Medical Information Systems or "Don't worry--it always beeps when you do that!" by Ramon M. Felciano, Stanford University, 1995 http://camis.stanford.edu/people/felciano/research/humanerro r/humanerrortalk.html

Human Error in Medicine bibliography:

Towards ethical guidelines for e-health: JMIR (Journal of Medical Internet Research) Theme Issue on eHealth Ethics – January 2001 http://www.jmir.org/2000/1/e7/index.htm

Their editorial outlines issues in online medical ethics, including a swipe at the HONCode (which is answered on the HON site at:

http://camis.stanford.edu/people/felciano/research/humanerro r/humanerrorbib.html

http://www.hon.ch/HONcode/jeers/jmir_hon_reply.html

The paper includes suggestions for what a developer can do to improve the situation: • Have “error awareness” • Take a systemic view • Use errors as tools to analyze your design. • Be willing to redesign. • Use simulations when possible. • Automate data collection for error analysis. • Perform structured evaluations to estimate human performance. • Anticipate error through better coding.

EHealth Code of Ethics

On Wednesday, May 24, 2000 the eHealth Ethics Initiative introduced an International Code of Ethics for health care sites and services on the Internet. The event took place at the Dirksen Senate Building in Washington, DC. Internet Healthcare Coalition home page http://www.ihealthcoalition.org/index.html

EHealth Ethics Initiative http://www.ihealthcoalition.org/ethics/ethics.html

Code of Ethics http://www.ihealthcoalition.org/ethics/ehcode.html

Critical Legal Issues of the Patient Record by Elizabeth Bowman and Mary McCain, The University of Tennessee-Memphis, 1998 (abstract only from EEI21 The Ethics of Electronic Information in the 2st Century conference). Note the next conference will be October 1821, 2001 in Memphis http://www.memphis.edu/ethics21/98eei/98abs.htm

Open-Source Medical Information Management by Daniel L. Johnson, 1999 An outpatient physician makes a case for open software for the electronic patient record. http://lorenzo.uwstout.edu/QQMIM/medicalfreesource.html

Practical Software Engineering – Social, Ethical and Professional Issues. Course outline by Rob Kremer http://www.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~kremer/courses/451/Ethics.html

Includes outlines of the ACM and IEEE codes of ethics, including brief case studies. This article includes a reprint of those codes in a relatively easy to read format. Bibliography includes references from CACM and IEE. This article includes a reprint of those codes. Ethics On The World Wide Web – bibliography of medical ethics web sites http://commfaculty.fullerton.edu/lester/ethics/medical.html


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(PDF download in English and Spanish from this page) Summary

Anyone who users the Internet for health-related reasons has a right to expect that organizations and individuals who provide health information, products or services online will uphold the following guiding principles 1. Candor: Disclose information that if known by consumers would likely affect consumers’ understanding or use of the site or purchase or use of a product or service. 2. Honesty: Be truthful and not deceptive 3. Quality: Provide health information that is accurate, easy to understand,and up-to-date. And Provide the information users need to make their own judgements about the health information, products or services provided by the site. 4. Informed Consent: Respect users’ right to determine whether or how their personal information may be collected, used, or shared. 5. Privacy: Respect the obligation to protect users’ privacy. 6. Professionalism in Online Health Care: Respect fundamental ethical obligations to patients and clients.

Ethics in HCI

7. 8.

And Inform and educated patients and clients about the limitations of online health care. Responsible Partnering: Ensure that organizations and sites with which they affiliate are trustworthy. Accountability: Provide meaningful opportunity for users to give feedback to the site. And Monitor their compliance with the eHealth Code of Ethics

Health on the Net Foundation

This organization was founded out of a 1995 international conference on The Use of the Internet and World-Wide Web for Telematics in Healthcare. One of their projects is a Code of Conduct available in 17 languages. Sites can apply for membership and the site includes a checklist for validation. It is primarily concerned with how clearly the source of both data and funding for a site can be determined as well as whether privacy and advertising policies are available.


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Health on the Net http://www.hon.ch/home.html

HON Code of Conduct for medication and health web sites (English version) – http://www.hon.ch/HONcode/Conduct.html?HONConduct895 856 Summary

The HONCode includes statements on: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

Authority Complementarity Confidentiality Attribution Justifiability Transparency of authorship Transparency of sponsorship Honesty in advertising and editorial policy

Ethics in HCI