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Design ethical services

Design ethical services

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What is designing ethical services?

Designing ethical services involves creating and delivering services that address user needs and provide public benefits in an open, transparent, fair, secure and inclusive way. The Government of Canada is responsible for designing and delivering services that not only address linguistic, geographical, technological and socioeconomic barriers, but also mitigate possible biases during all stages of the service delivery life cycle and decision-making milestones.

Why is this important?

Designing ethical services is crucial for building trust, protecting users, complying with regulations, mitigating risks and contributing positively to society. It ensures that services are delivered responsibly and equitably, leading to long-term benefits for both users and organizations.

How to do it

These are suggested steps on how to design ethical services. Depending on where you’re at in your process, you might not need to follow every step.  

Discover
  • Know your obligations. Identify and understand the relevant regulations and policies that apply to information management, human rights, values and ethics, responsible use of technology, privacy and security. This will ensure fairness, transparency, privacy and accountability.
  • Consult with your regulatory experts. Throughout your process (discover, build, test, monitor and iterate) consult with security officials, diversity and inclusion specialists, legal services, and privacy and security experts. They will help you navigate regulatory requirements, mitigate bias and make fair decisions.
  • Consult with your privacy officials. If your service requires managing personal information, privacy officials must be consulted to determine whether a privacy impact assessment is needed to identify and mitigate privacy risks ahead of deployment.
  • Consider whether artificial Intelligence (AI) could help. Investigate how AI can be applied to your product, making sure to learn about the abilities and limits of the tools so that you can critically assess them.
  • Do user experience (UX) research. Consult people from diverse backgrounds who would be directly impacted by the deployment of your product to identify its impacts on different population groups.
  • Understand and address access barriers. Understand and address access barriers that might exist for users.
  • Conduct an algorithmic impact assessment. Conduct an assessment to understand and manage the risks of using automated decision systems to make or support decisions that impact clients’ rights, privileges or interests.
  • Conduct a risk analysis. Conduct a risk analysis to determine potential issues and mitigate negative outcomes for users. 
  • Establish a data management plan. Establish a data management plan for handling personal information and other sensitive information throughout its life cycle, including the end-of-life stage. Ensure that data is relevant, accurate, up-to-date and maintained to support trustworthy data-driven decisions. For more information on managing data quality so that it meets the needs and the goals of users, consult the Guidance on data quality.
  • Ensure that there is an established advisory body. Before developing your product, make sure that you have an advisory body with a diverse group of independent experts to review and provide guidance on ethical considerations throughout your product’s development life cycle.
Build
  • Develop prototypes. Develop prototypes and mock-ups, ensuring that ethical considerations are embedded in the design, such as inclusivity, fairness, accessibility and diversity.  
  • Include privacy and security enhancing technologies. To protect information and prevent unauthorized access, implement measures like trusted user IDs, complex passwords, data minimization, de-identification, multi-factor authentication (MFA) and encryption into your product. 
  • Select suppliers with responsible practices. Choose ethical suppliers who can demonstrate that they know of and can meet your policy, legislative and other obligations in ensuring that services are effective, accessible, transparent, fair and inclusive. To do this, consult with your departmental procurement specialist to ensure that all requirements are met.
  • Adopt products that are appropriate for the task. Make sure you have an operational need for your use of tools and choices on technology.  
  • Be transparent. Be transparent about how you use personal information and explain the legislative authority for its use and how your product collects, uses, stores and manages user data. Make sure to also tell your users where and when AI is being used to support the product. Additionally, share the steps taken to address bias and ensure fair outcomes for everyone, as transparency in these efforts helps build trust and confidence in the service.
  • Integrate user feedback mechanisms. Add a feedback mechanism to your service like a survey so users can submit feedback, enabling you to identify issues and ensure that your product meets diverse needs. This promotes transparency and accountability.
  • Conduct a Gender Bias Analysis Plus (GBA Plus). At every step of the process (discover, build, test, monitor and iterate) integrate a GBA Plus to be more inclusive in your approach to developing, delivering and evaluating your product.
Test
  • Test for unintended bias. Before launching and after deployment, test your product and data to identify potential biases in algorithms, data sets and user interfaces to ensure fairness and inclusivity.
  • Do usability testing. Conduct usability testing with diverse groups across various uses to identify potential ethical issues, such as exclusion and discrimination. Usability tests ensure that your service meets official languages requirements and accessibility requirements.
  • Use user feedback. Collect ongoing user feedback to identify and address ethical issues as they arise. Consult with your values and ethics team to develop questions that cover ethical principles.
Monitor and iterate
  • Monitor your product continuously. Before and after launching, conduct regular system testing and monitor your product continuously, including the collected data, model and outputs. This will allow you to identify any issues that need to be addressed.
  • Measure ethical principles. Include key performance indicators (KPIs) that track ethical principles and seek out indicators of bias.
  • Conduct regular audits. Conduct regular audits and assessments of your product against ethical standards, accessibility, privacy and security standards.
  • Manage risks. Develop measures that address risks and negative impacts. 
  • Ensure continuous training. Ensure continuous training for team members focusing on ethical challenges, best practices and regulatory obligations.
  • Iterate continuously. Repeat this process (discover, build, test, monitor and iterate) as you learn more about the evolving needs of your users.

Resources

Principles

Ethical design principles to adopt in your product development:

  • User autonomy
  • Fairness
  • Inclusivity
  • Transparency
  • Privacy and security
  • Accessibility
  • Accountability
Consideration
Tools and resources
Case studies
Talent
  • Legal expertise
  • Privacy expertise
  • Inclusive design
  • Accessibility
  • Digital procurement
GC policy instruments

Laws

Policies

Directives, guidelines and standards

GC Communities and Training

GC communities of practice

Training

Help us improve

This work is iterative, and we will continue to improve on it based on your feedback.

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Share your thoughts and suggestions by email: servicedigital-servicesnumerique@tbs-sct.gc.ca

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