Ethics and Usability Mentoring – an Exploratory Study

It is still difficult to achieve the ideas of user centred systems design in organisations, and we have seen that usability is given low priority in in-house systems development. In this context, usability mentoring has the potential of being a powerful method for achieving user-centred systems design. However, when applying a method such as usability mentoring one has to consider the ethical considerations that it might imply. This exploratory study on ethics and usability mentoring was carried out in an action research setting in a large government organisation in Sweden. Nine mentées were given the opportunity to discuss usability activities related to their work situation. The mentée were people with key positions within the organisation. The mentoring program has run for six months, and on averaged each mentée have had the possibility to meet the mentor every three weeks. Our findings indicate that the mentoring program made mentées work more actively with usability activities; hence the mentoring program had a visible effect on their actions. However, during the mentoring program several ethical issues occurred that are described and discussed in this paper. Examples of such ethical problems are personal conflicts between the mentees, a project leader asking for information from the mentoring sessions and mentees with hidden agendas that might influence the structure and strategic goals of the organisation. In the discussion part of the paper possible methods to handle such ethical problems are discussed. Finally, some suggestions of future work are explored.