Adapting the artifact
Some products have been shown to cause harmful behavior in their users, such as causing addictive behavior, low attention spans, being used to spread false information or even causing accidents (Coyne et al., 2019; David et al., 2015; Ishida & Matsuura, 2001; Nasar & Troyer, 2013; Primack & Escobar-Viera, 2017; Shuib et al., 2015b; Strayer & Johnston, 2001; Trowbridge et al., 2018; Vos et al., 2019; Wu & McCormick, 2018). An AO who has a virtuous disposition would aim not to let their products lead to such outcomes and if they did, they would try to remedy the situation through making needed alterations. If this was not immediately possible, they may even take the route of being open and honest with their users about the potential for negative side effects. In this way we might envision that UXD design, for virtuous designers and AOs should be thought of in the same way that pharmaceutical companies produce medicine. After all, a pharmaceutical company wouldn’t knowingly let a medicine that could cause serious side effects onto the market without an effort to warn and mitigate consumers.

Malevolent tendencies
AOs may often start production from assessing the benefits that will accrue to them and not taking into account the consequences for users. Examples of this are intentionally creating games knowing they have addictive components, creating applications to gather user’s data and selling it to other companies, and creating social media applications based on the knowledge that they could be potentially addictive and thus bring more income to the AO. In these cases we could say there is a high chance that the product is unethical and the behavior of the AO is exploitative.

Fair pricing
Pricing is a key component of virtue when it comes to designing and marketing products. Unfair pricing is not only about the cost, but about the way that prices can exclude certain demographics. For example, industry-standard software with a premium price tag may be unfair to students who need it for their work, but lack the financial means to afford it. A benevolent AO may look towards solutions that involve both a fair price for all but also perhaps strategies that acknowledge differing social position.

AO's responsibilities
AOs are responsible not only for their own behaviour but also for colleagues across the production process in a way that is beneficial for everyone, including the end user.
‍
Relationship to other agents
AOs are not just concerned about the ethical outcomes for users of the product, but also the other agents involved in the production.Workers can often feel undervalued in terms of their creativity, experience and knowledge and may be treated as mere ‘tools’ by other agents. This can lead to feelings of frustration. However, AOs with a disposition to virtuous behaviour such as  benevolence, kindness and respect would be more likely to trust the designers or other workers/agents. Even in cases where trust breaks down, they would approach the situation with honesty as they try to find a solution or even hire another designer.

Furthermore, there may be cases where AOs do not give their agents adequate time to execute given tasks. Therefore, a virtuous consideration would take into account the agents’ timeframe and needs during work and refrain from repeatedly pressuring them, especially if they are not appropriately rewarded. In summary, interfering or belittling any agent’s knowledge is not in line with any virtue.  

Benevolent vs. Malevolent UXd
If there is a malevolent UXd or AO, the outcomes of their work will likely be unethical. For UXds that are under the direction of an AO, whether they are virtuous or not may depend on to what extent they are willingly collaborating on the design of products that knowingly cause harm or use others for personal gain. On the other hand, if a UXd is participating in a project because they have little choice in the matter, for instance, if they are compelled to work in order to be financially secure, then the case of whether they are virtuous or not becomes more complicated and it becomes more difficult to ascribe them malevolence in cases when their participation is socially bound.

Privacy
Disrespecting users’ privacy, tracking users, and psychological targeting are common issues in UXD (Beake, 2014; Matz et al., 2017; Siroker & Koomen, 2013). There are fields of work where respecting a user’s privacy is common custom or even law, for example in the medical field, where breaches of privacy can lead to negative reputational and legal consequences.  
‍
However, in UXD, there have been many companies where tracking of personal data and abuse of privacy have become commonplace, usually for monetary gain of unvirtuous AO and other agents. While there can be cases where tracking users is necessary for the application to work, in those cases we would expect a virtuous person to seek permission and/or provide adequate information to the users beforehand.

Manipulative user experiences
Another way in which virtue can be subverted is through malicious user experiences, such as sneaking in extra or hidden costs, or manipulating user navigation through features such as infinite scrolling (Conti & Sobiesk, 2010; Gray et al., 2018; Noë et al., 2019). Marketing has become a regular part of our daily lives, and we have grown accustomed to digital advertisements trying to lure us into clicking.  While some of us may have learned to ignore such intrusions, they still offer an example of poor user experience. Such interfaces and marketing techniques aim to get us to click, buy things and sign up for subscriptions that are difficult to cancel. Earning money may not be a vice in and of itself, but earning it through such schemes of design feels disrespectful to users. An honest salesperson would present their wares for sale in a transparent manner while the methods mentioned above feel cowardly and vulgar.

Gamification
Gamification and gaming are other areas where the UXd could become exploitative towards users. Gamification elements could be items such as rewards, badges and community based scores or ranking. While gamification can be beneficial for users, there is also a strong possibility that such elements may contribute to addictive behavior (Hamari et al., 2014). These kinds of elements may be created by dishonest creators and are not in line with virtuous behavior.

Usability research
Research is a necessary part of product implementation. However, it can venture outside of virtuous behaviour when the motivations for research are self-serving, such as research into how best to earn more money or take advantage of users. This would reflect greedy and unjust behaviour on the part of the designers of the research. For example, suppose an online shop is organizing user research intending to find behavior patterns that could make users buy more products so that the shop can earn more money. In that case, this does not reflect a disposition towards benevolence or honesty. Likely, they will target and exploit users’ weaknesses, like tendencies to compulsive buying or boredom, rather than their well being and then adapt the platform based on their findings. If, on the other hand, the same shop organizes user research intending to make shopping a pleasant, user-friendly experience, this would show values of virtue. and try to consider their weaknesses by helping them avoid them, rather than triggering them on purpose.

A/B testing
Another form of research is ‘behind-the-scenes’ research, often called A/B testing or analyzing user behavior (like analytics applications) (Matz et al., 2017; Siroker & Koomen, 2013). Similar to other user research, the essential question in terms of ethics is the motivation for the research. Research purely for monetary gain would not be in line with virtuous behaviour and neither would research for personal gain, such as researching the effectiveness of images in a political campaign. Such research may be present in elections, and instead of offering potential voters an honest and transparent manifesto, campaigners may research the effectiveness of certain imagery in campaign material. Users may not even be aware of such research or it may be noted only in small print. In these cases it can be hard to argue that such behaviour is virtuous.

Cookies
Further, having a  Terms and Conditions or Privacy Policy page on every website and product does not benefit anyone and does not allow for a good user experience. While such pages may protect AOs and other agents from legal repercussions, we might ask whether such things would even be necessary if the agents had originally approached the product with ethics of virtue and with an intention to create positive relationships with users. If users could rely on and trust the artifact and the agents involved then there might not be a need for overly complicated procedures of consent that most users are unlikely to read and perceive as an annoyance.

An experience that offers protection bundled with annoyance seems not to be a good situation from a design perspective. It appears that all companies have to implement this experience owing to the less than virtuous behavior of some of the big ones. This calls for a different kind of resolution, one that would rather block problematic companies’ behavior and allow a comfortable user experience for others.

Relationship to other agents
User experience designers need to also consider their relationship with other members of the team, especially those responsible for implementation. Designers, if they are committed to a virtuous path, need to be mindful of the abilities of team members and not push them into workloads that are too heavy or difficult to meet within certain timeframes.

Benevolent vs. malevolent UId
An ill-intended UId can design interfaces that guide users into clicking certain buttons or elements in the interest of UId (or AO or UXd) and not in the user’s interest. For example, users can be manipulated by buttons that are highly saturated, bigger or greyed-out as well as certain imagery (Conti & Sobiesk, 2010; Gray et al., 2018). A benevolent, honest UId would focus on the user and try to make the interface pleasant for them and not use the interface as a tool for manipulation.

Design as a tool for manipulation
Manipulative user interfaces change the role of design from complementing a good function to masking a bad function. When a design is used as a tool for manipulation, it is not a design centered towards users or their experience, but towards the creators. Users will inevitably, in my experience, feel this difference.

A benevolent developer
In my experience, developers check the artifact prototypes to see how complicated it is to execute functions and provide suggestions for improvements (e.g., suggest functions that would make the artifact less complicated, user-friendly or faster to load). A benevolent developer would be oriented towards suggesting improvements that would benefit users (e.g., optimizing the website to be faster to load and more efficient to use).
‍
A benevolent developer would be orientated towards the user in both design and post-production. Similarly to other agents, our assessment of the developer’s ethics relates to their place within the process and their relationships to others and whether they are intentionally contributing to malevolent design or being directed to with little choice in the matter owing to personal circumstances.

Malicious code
Malicious code (hacking, hidden tracking, privacy abuse, infecting computers, among others) harms users for the benefit of agents involved (e.g., monetary benefits) in the process and is thus not virtuous behaviour.

Similar to visual language, it is suggested that marketing can have a manipulative role; in UXD, this can happen through copywriting. Manipulative marketing is not truthful about presenting the product (Sher, 2011), but rather uses techniques to make users believe the product is better than others, without sufficient evidence. Copywriters may exaggerate the quality of the product and use false arguments or appeal to users’ emotions, such as their hopes and fears. By using words such as better or best (e.g., our product is named the best in the market, our product is better than), up to (‘save up to 30%’ is not the same as ‘save 30%’), acts, and helps (our product ‘could help’, rather than our product ‘does’) copywriters present false or deceiving facts about their product (Schrank, 1996). An act of deception or being untruthful is not in line with any of the virtues (especially honesty). Therefore, a benevolent copywriter would be honest in their presentation of a product in the content and marketing.
‍
If a copywriter found out that their text is harmful to users in any way, a benevolent copywriter would take action to adapt it accordingly.

Users who use the artifact also have a responsibility to act not to hurt other people, such as the people they interact with inside the artifact, creators, and themselves.

UXD and addiction
It has been shown that artifacts are built in a way that could potentially cause addictive behavior (Coyne et al., 2019; Noë et al., 2019; Shuib et al., 2015). To make an analogy to cigarette addiction, this is caused in the first place by the simple fact that cigarettes exist and thus this part of the responsibility is on the creator’s side. However, once a user lights a cigarette, they also take some partial responsibility for their action too. Addiction, then, is a product of both the producer and the user. In UXD, the same holds true when it comes to products that encourage or don’t mitigate against addictive behaviour. The virtue of temperance, which refers to the ability to have self-control over bodily and life pleasures, is relevant here for user responsibility. Nevertheless, it is not my intention to be ignorant towards the fact that addictions could be hard to overcome, or even to become aware of them, but to state that there is partially a responsibility for users.

Learning more about the harmful parts of UXD
Creators like to tailor their products based on the information they know about a user. Therefore it is suggested that users educate themselves on the strategies of creators that may be used to exploit them and be aware of more benevolent substitutes.

Cyberbullying
Social media and other UXD products provide platforms where users can ‘exercise’ their freedom of speech. This often leads to online bullying and disrespecting other users (Craig et al., 2020; Kowalski et al., 2014; Nixon, 2014). There is no need to say that acts like this are not in line with virtue, and users that have a disposition to virtuous behavior would not act in this way and probably try to help people affected if possible. Also, there is a responsibility on the AO and UXd to act if their products are used for cyberbullying.

Stealing artifacts
Stealing artifacts like computer software or applications or abusing platforms for sharing stolen artifacts is an issue that is already addressed by governments or companies with the consequences of punishment (either by money or by the prison). Stealing is surely not a virtue, but, in my view, it would be more beneficial to seek ways to limit the behaviour not  by punishing people or sending them to prison, but rather by finding ways to make applications more accessible and affordable for users and educating people on the consequences of stealing.