Can we afford ethics?
Can We Afford Ethics: Ethical Decision-Making Under MVP Constraints (Mixed-Methods Research | ACM CHI 2026 Submission) This research was submitted to ACM CHI 2026, the premier international conference on Human-Computer Interaction. In keeping with the double-blind peer review process, this case study documents research design and methodology only. Findings and conclusions will be shared following the review outcome in July 2026. The Problem: Every UX practitioner has been in that meeting. The one where accessibility gets cut. Where the edge case user gets deprioritised. Where someone says "we'll fix it in v2" and everyone in the room knows they won't. What's less understood is what actually happens inside that moment — how practitioners reason through it, what it costs them, and what they quietly do about it when official channels fail. Existing HCI ethics literature offers frameworks and principles. It offers very little on ethics as a lived, real-time experience under organisational pressure. This research set out to close that gap — not by asking practitioners what they would do in the abstract, but by studying what they actually do when the pressure is real. Role: Lead UX Researcher & Co-Author Duration: Jan – Apr 2026 (4 months) Submitted to: ACM CHI 2026 (results pending July 2026)
Client:
Independent Research
Role:
Co-Author
Year:
(16 weeks) 2026
Hypothesis & Research Questions
H1: Under extreme, simulated organisational time constraints, UX practitioners will systematically abandon user safety and accessibility features in favour of executive-mandated business metrics.
This hypothesis shaped the simulation design — we needed to create genuine pressure, not hypothetical scenarios, in order to observe real decision-making behaviour rather than socially desirable responses.
Three research questions then guided the qualitative phase:
RQ1: How do practitioners rationalise the intentional omission of critical ethical features, and how do they navigate the resulting moral stress?
RQ2: How does a perceived lack of structural agency and workplace authority impact a practitioner's capacity to advocate against unethical executive mandates?
RQ3: When direct advocacy fails, what covert strategies do practitioners employ to mask or integrate ethical features within heavily constrained environments?
RQ3 in particular shaped the most significant conceptual contribution of the study — and is the focus of the findings that will be published post-review.
Study Design
The study used a two-phase mixed-methods design, deliberately structured to capture both behavioural data and reflective interpretation.
Why two phases? A single method would have produced either behavioural signals without context, or reflective accounts without behavioural validity. The two-phase structure allowed us to observe what practitioners did under pressure, then understand why through their own framing.
Phase 1 — Gamified Behavioural Simulation
To study real-time ethical decision-making, we needed to generate real pressure — not ask people to imagine it. We designed a gamified behavioural simulation that placed participants inside a realistic product delivery scenario involving a series of ethical trade-offs: decisions about feature scope, accessibility cuts under deadline pressure, and competing mandates from simulated executive stakeholders.
The critical design decision: The ethical dimension of the simulation was deliberately non-salient. Participants were not told they were being observed for ethical reasoning. This was essential to reduce social desirability bias — one of the most significant methodological risks in ethics research, where participants consistently report more ethical behaviour than they actually exhibit.
Participants: 20 UX practitioners, recruited across varying experience levels, company sizes, and industry sectors.
Recruitment rationale: Purposive sampling ensured the participant group reflected the range of organisational contexts where these pressures arise, not just large tech, but agencies, startups, and in-house product teams because the structural dynamics of ethical pressure differ meaningfully across these environments.
Phase 2 — Reflexive Thematic Analysis
Following the simulation, participants took part in debrief interviews exploring their in-simulation decision-making, the pressures they experienced, and how they made sense of the choices they made.
Data was analysed using Reflexive Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2019) — chosen for its suitability for interpretivist research where the goal is not to count occurrences but to understand meaning. The reflexive approach also required active examination of how our own positions as researchers shaped the analysis — particularly important given that both co-authors have direct professional experience of the pressures being studied.
Key Methodological Decisions
Why a gamified simulation rather than interviews alone? Self-report data on ethical behaviour is notoriously unreliable. People describe what they believe they should do. A simulation under realistic constraints captures behaviour closer to the real thing — giving us something to analyse, not just something to take at face value.
Why Reflexive Thematic Analysis rather than grounded theory or framework analysis? The research question was generative and interpretive — we weren't testing a pre-existing ethics framework or mapping data to established categories. We were building new understanding of a phenomenon that hadn't been studied this way before. RTA was the methodologically honest choice.
Why 20 participants? Sample size in qualitative research is determined by the depth and richness of data generated, not statistical power. 20 practitioners across varied organisational contexts gave us sufficient breadth for thematic saturation while keeping the simulation protocol rigorous and the debrief process genuinely in-depth.
What This Project Demonstrates
End-to-end mixed-methods research design — from hypothesis formation through study design, execution, analysis, and academic writing
Behavioural research methodology — designing for ecological validity and social desirability bias reduction
Reflexive Thematic Analysis at a level of rigour appropriate for top-tier academic publication
Research ethics in practice — participant consent, debrief protocols, and managing researcher positionality in sensitive topic research
Co-authorship and academic communication — translating complex mixed-methods findings into structured academic argument for a specialist HCI audience
Status
Submitted to ACM CHI 2026. Review outcome expected July 2026. This page will be updated with findings, themes, and publication details at that time.