You Care About How You Do Business. Does Your Design Know That?

What It Looks Like to Design for Real People

There is a design language embedded into just about every corner of the internet… and you most likely know it, even if you’ve never had a name for it.

The countdown timer on the course sales page. The “only 3 spots left” banner on the coaching offer. The pop-up that appears the moment you try to leave a website, guilt-tripping you into opting into something. The content you want to access requires you to sign up for a free trial and enter your credit card info to receive it.

This is the design of extraction. It’s everywhere, including sometimes, in the spaces built by people who genuinely care about doing business differently but have never been shown a different way.

As a designer, this type of design pressure has never sat well with me. I’ve been someone known for critiquing unethical business practices, advocating for a better way of doing things, for almost as long as I’ve been working for myself. And yet, I haven’t ventured much into the arena of unethical design, that is, until now. Instead, I’ve just bit my tongue, rolled my eyes, and tried my best to avoid implementing these types of norms.

In this article, I am going to break all of this down in hopes that it helps increase your awareness around how extractive and unethical design can be, so that maybe you can begin to spot it and not fall for its traps. As well, maybe this will inspire us all to strive to do better, because when we know better, we should follow that up with changed behavior. Let’s dive in!

Designing for the Algorithm vs. Designing for the Human

Most digital design today isn’t actually designed for people. It’s designed to encourage desired behaviors. This is often referred to as “dark design,” and its aim is to produce a measurable, reportable, optimizable behavior (a click, a sign-up, a purchase, a return visit). Dark design tries to manipulate the viewer into taking actions that they normally may not take, often robbing folks of their autonomy due to its non-transparent habits. The human on the other side of the screen is simply the vehicle through which that behavior is extracted.

When design is evaluated by conversion rate, when folks are rewarded for engagement metrics but not impact metrics, when A/B tests determine what stays and what gets cut instead of leading with what most aligns with values… the system naturally selects for whatever manipulates most efficiently. Not what serves most honestly.

The result is an internet that feels like walking through a minefield. Toss in the constantly-rising trend of propaganda, fake AI content, and misinformation… and we have to become extremely conscious and critical online users to escape falling into the traps of manipulative design. When every element of a design is optimized to extract, the user isn’t a person anymore. They’re a conversion rate waiting to happen. This is the water we are swimming in.

What Care Actually Looks Like on a Screen

Designing with care is not about removing calls to action or pretending we don’t need to sell our products or services. It is a fundamentally different orientation that asks: what does someone actually need right now?

Take a look at the difference between these two hypothetical service-based websites, noticing how you feel imagining being on each site.

The first opens with a full-screen video, copy about transformation and big results, a scrolling ticker of fancy brand partnership logos, and three pricing tiers… all within the first fold. It wants you to be impressed, then overwhelmed, then committed before you’ve had a chance to think.

The second opens with a clear, declarative sentence about who it serves. It gives you room to read. The navigation is calm and spacious. The testimonials are specific and honest rather than exaggerated or even made up (Yes, people actually do this!). When you get to the contact page, the form asks direct and important questions, making you feel seen and understood. It trusts you to reach out when you’re ready, rather than trying to manufacture readiness.

One of these designs performs better in short-term conversion tests. The other builds the kind of trust that results in clients who refer their peers, stay for years, and actually believe in the work.

And it’s not just websites. The same extractive design language shows up in our social media feeds every single day.

Consider two hypothetical social media posts. The first is doing a lot of work before you read a single word.

The design: a high-contrast graphic, all-caps headline, the kind of neon yellow or urgent red pulled from warning signs. A layout so dense it leaves no visual pause, every inch of the canvas is occupied, because breathing room lets people think, and thinking is the enemy of impulse. A CTA button in a shade chosen because it converts.

The message it sends before the caption even loads: READ ME READ ME READ ME! This is urgent! The thing about this type of design that bothers me the most is what it does to our nervous systems. When we consume content designed in this way, it sends our nervous systems into a state of anxiety, because it makes us feel like something is wrong, potentially dangerous, or so urgent that we must act right away.

The caption confirms it: “Are you exhausted, undercharging, and doing everything yourself with nothing to show for it?” One sentence. Every insecurity a small business owner carries is stacked and triggered. Then you will often see a program, a fix, and a link to follow. The design and the copy work together as a single extraction mechanism; a one-size-fits-all language engineered to make as many people as possible feel personally called out. You feel seen, but in a way that leaves you feeling worse about yourself than before you read it.

The second post arrives quite differently.

The design: room to breathe with thoughtful spacing. An image that feels human and relatable… maybe a candid moment, a calming color palette, or something that doesn’t demand a reaction before you’ve had a chance to choose to engage. Readable typography without being so in your face that you’re overwhelmed. A color palette that came from the brand rather than a conversion template. Nothing about the visual composition is manufacturing urgency or trying to convince you of anything.

The caption: “Running a small business is genuinely hard, and I don’t think we talk enough about the kind of hard it actually is.” No formula. No fix. It doesn’t position the writer as someone who has transcended the difficulty. It sits in it, honestly, with the reader. There’s no pitch. Just honest and vulnerable sharing, which, it turns out, is one of the most powerful things a brand can offer.

One of these posts is designed to make you feel deficient enough to buy. The other is designed to make you feel less alone and understood. The reach metrics might favor the first. The trust built by the second is worth far more.

Care in design means making space for a person to arrive at their own decision, not engineering the path so narrowly that they barely notice they made one.

The Design Details That Signal Your Design Approach

White space shows care. It is the visual equivalent of giving someone room to think. When a design is dense and overcrowded (ignoring all design parameters), the implicit message to the user is: we don’t trust you to stay unless we hold your attention captive.

Plain, human language shows care. When a micro business or solo proprietor brand writes copy in industry jargon and fancy promises, when they bury their pricing and make you have to jump through hoops to find out what it is, when they use language that plays on your insecurities, fears, and challenges in a way that makes you feel like something is wrong with you… That’s not a brand voice. That’s a trick. Clear, truthful language that is human in that it considers the realities that we actually face, by contrast, is an act of respect.

Honest hierarchy shows care. Not every CTA needs to be primary (and sometimes we don’t need a CTA at all!). Not every page needs a hero button. Letting other design options exist as equals… giving people the ability to browse, to learn, to pause, tells them that you’re not desperate for the transaction. That the relationship matters more than the conversion!

And perhaps most importantly: exit options show care. When you make it easy to unsubscribe, to opt out, to say no, you are telling the person that their autonomy matters more than your metric. That is, counterintuitively, one of the most trust-building things we can do.

What would it look like to build a design system as a care framework?

It would mean that our designs themselves carry intention. It would mean that accessibility isn’t an option; it’s a foundation. That inclusive language is part of the component documentation. That the design system asks us to slow down and consider impact, not just implementation.

This is a bigger lift. It requires the people building and maintaining designs to hold both the technical and the ethical simultaneously. But a system is only as good as what it makes possible… and a design framework rooted in care will always leave a more positive, memorable impact on someone than an extractive one ever will.

A design system built without ethics encoded into it will default to whatever is most expedient. In most commercial contexts, this means extractive.

On AI, Speed, and What We Risk Losing

I am cautious and increasingly troubled by the way I see AI being adopted in design, and in business more broadly.

The dominant conversation around AI in the design world right now is almost entirely about speed. How much faster can we prototype? How quickly can we generate deliverables? How do we compress a process that used to take days or weeks into something that takes hours? These are not unreasonable questions. But they are incomplete ones.

Speed is not neutral. When we use AI to accelerate design work, we are choosing what gets compressed. And too often, what gets compressed is exactly the part that matters most: the slow thinking, the genuine engagement with a specific human problem, the refinement that comes from sitting with something long enough to understand it. The creative struggle that produces something original rather than something forgettable.

When we use AI to move faster, we should at least be honest about what we’re moving past.

There are harms that most of the speed conversation skips over entirely. The infrastructure required to run AI at scale includes data centers, energy consumption, and water usage for cooling. The impact of AI lands on real communities, disproportionately in communities that already carry more than their share of environmental burden. The carbon cost of generating a logo iteration or a set of homepage variations is small on its own. At the scale of an entire industry doing this millions of times a day, it is not.

I’m also genuinely concerned about what the wholesale adoption of AI-generated design does to originality. AI models are trained on what already exists. They are, by design, sophisticated cookie-cutter copies of other stuff. That is useful for some things, sure. It is not the same, though, for a designer who has spent years developing a specific visual style, who brings their lived experience and particular way of seeing to a project, who makes unique choices because they are genuinely thinking and pushing boundaries rather than just duplicating what’s already been created.

When we replace that process with generated outputs in the name of efficiency, we are not just changing how design gets made. We are changing what design is. And I think we owe it to ourselves, and to the people we create for, to ask whether that’s a trade we want to make, rather than simply a wave we’re swept up in.

I don’t have a clean answer to any of this. I don’t think anyone does. But the absence of easy answers is not a reason to stop asking the questions. If anything, it’s the reason to ask them more regularly.

Why This Matters for Your Business

The extraction model of design works in high-volume, low-trust situations. It works when you don’t care about the state someone purchases from you (such as purchasing out of fear, shame, pressure, or guilt)… you just want the sale.

For the businesses and individuals I work with, the client relationship is the product. I’m not just selling a thing. I am providing the experience of working with you, over time, with trust, respect, transparency, and collaboration at the foundation.

In that context, a manipulative design is not just ethically questionable. It’s strategically defeating. Because the person who fills out your form due to a pop-up cornering them is not the same as someone who found you, read about your work slowly and intentionally, felt seen by it, and decided they wanted to hire you. That relationship is quite different.

When I design a website or marketing content for a client, I am not trying to maximize the number of inquiries or random engagement. I am trying to attract and connect with the right ones. That requires a design that is honest about who you are, specific about who you serve, and calm enough to let the right people recognize themselves in it.

Conversion-first design fills your pipeline. Care-first design fills it with the right people in a thoughtful way.

Three Ways to Design with More Care Today

You don’t necessarily have to rebuild your website or hire a designer right away to begin practicing this. You may just need to slow down and look at what you already have… through the eyes of the person on the other side of the screen.

1. Do a feeling audit of your own digital presence. Open your website, your last three social media posts, and your most recent email. Read them as if you’ve never heard of yourself. Ask honestly: how does this make someone feel? Does it create calm or urgency? Does it assume the reader is lacking something? Does it give them room to think, or does it push them toward a decision before they’re ready? Write down what you notice.

2. Find one manipulative element and remove it. The countdown timer that isn’t tied to a real deadline. The pop-up that fires three seconds after someone lands on your homepage. The opt-out checkbox that’s pre-checked by default. The scarcity claim that’s been “only 3 spots left” for the last eight months. Pick the one that makes you wince a little when you really look at it. Take it out.

3. Rewrite one piece of content from a human place rather than pain-pointing. Take your most-used piece of marketing copy, such as your homepage headline, your Instagram bio, your email welcome sequence opener, and rewrite it without naming a problem, manufacturing urgency, or positioning yourself as the only cure. Start instead from: here is who I am, here is who I serve, here is what I genuinely believe about the work. See what happens when you speak to the person you want to attract rather than the fear you want to activate. Another tip: Try crafting a piece of content that has no sales pressure or purchasing agenda!

Designing for care is a practice. And like most practices, it compounds over time into a body of work that feels safe to engage with, a community base that truly trusts you, and a business that doesn’t require you to make people feel bad to grow.

What came up for you reading this? Whether it’s something you want to change, something you’re already doing well, or something you’re completely sick of seeing others do… I’d love to hear where you’re at. :)

Until next time…

Natalie Brite | DoGoodBiz Studio

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Hi, I’m Natalie Brite, the founder of DoGoodBiz Studio: a creative studio built on the belief that how you show up online is an extension of how you do business, and that both are worth doing with care. We love supporting folks who want to build a presence online that actually reflects who they are and how they want to operate.

They work at the intersection of creativity and social responsibility, partnering with independent businesses, sole proprietors, and values-led brands on the full range of what it takes to build a meaningful presence: brand identity, web design, content, strategy, and the harder conversations about ethics that most of the industry is still avoiding.

If you’ve ever felt like the dominant playbook for running and marketing a small business wasn’t built for people like you, welcome! I’m so glad you’re here.

Follow along on Substack for more, or visit our website to learn about working together.