March 5, 2024
When people talk about sustainable design, the first thing that often comes to mind is reducing the impact of physical materials and the products that are made out of them. Reduce, reuse and recycle is the mantra, and rightly so.
But what about sustainable design for digital products? It's easy to dismiss it as less important, and its true the footprint of say one email sent (4g CO2e) or one google search (less than 0.2g CO2e) is not huge compared to many other 'offline' things. However, in the case of the internet, it's all about scale. With 4.1 billion active internet users, and 3 trillion Google searches a year, its easy to see how all those little numbers add up.
In fact the total carbon footprint of the internet and all related infrastructure is estimated at around 3.7% of all global emissions. That's 1.7bn tonnes per year - around the same amount as the aviation industry! (source: BBC)
So imagine the impact if every website and application reduced its page load or server usage by 10%?
Here's how!
Ideation: Divergent thinking - imagining a broad range of creative solutions - is of course a key aspect of the design process. But as we start to converge on practical candidates, it becomes important to also ensure that potential impacts to people and planet are also part of our decision making process. For example when assessing solutions for against the four product risks, we can design and apply tests for environmental or social impact, or alignment to mission and purpose, as part of how we measure business viability.
User needs: When capturing and assessing stakeholder and user needs the tendency can often be to focus on the immediate and practical jobs to be done. But good sustainable design needs to consider all aspects of our place in the world, for example interrogating on an emotional and environmental level to elicit 'non-functional requirements' (NFRs) around inclusivity, circularity, accessibility, etc. These considerations should also be factored into test planning and ongoing measurement, so they form the criteria by which we judge if an implementation has been successful.
Low carbon tools: It's also important to consider the impact of the tools and equipment used in the process itself, aiming to reduce, reuse and recycle where possible. For example ideation and planning often relies on bringing people together in a room and working with whiteboards, paper and stickies. Or remote sessions might be run via tools like Figjam or Miro shared over a video call. Each will have their own pros and cons related to carbon footprint and sustainability, and 'low carbon' might not always mean paperless. Consider that a 1 hour video call / Miro session has about the same footprint per person as 160 new sticky notes*, or 1km driven in an average European petrol car. There isn't going to be a one size fits all answer, but there will be an optimal solution to be found for your team.
(*and if you're looking for good sticky notes look no further because this dude has done the research(?) !)
Frictionless journeys: The easier it is for a user to find what they need, the less resource demands there will be from wrong turns and extra page loads. Lightweight experiences, with intuitive navigation based on familiar design principles, will help users find their way efficiently and reduce unnecessary steps. Where it's relevant, circularity should also be designed seamlessly into customer journeys from the outset, to help it become normalised and avoid feeling like an onerous after-thought.
Inclusive practices: Inclusive experiences start with inclusive design practices. This means ensuring diverse perspectives are included as part of balanced teams, and that we remove bias from customer journeys by encouraging careful assessment of language, visuals, and hierarchies.
Minimalism: Keep attention heavy interactions like data capture forms and notifications minimal. Any functionality should be focused only on adding value to the experience - every unnecessary interaction is a cognitive distraction and potential resource hit. While good experience design should be intuitive and self explanatory, users can still get things wrong, and we should aim to assist them with errors, and provide useful guidance throughout the user journey.
Optimise assets: Every image or video asset or file that a page needs to load utilises resources (read: energy) right across the network from data center to your device. Of course we all want to design lovely, aesthetic experiences that are pleasant to look at, but this should be balanced with value and necessity. Is that big video really adding value to the experience? Could it be a static picture or animated graphic for the same impact? Where assets are needed, aim to optimise and minimise weight to keep page load and resource demands low. And where they aren't needed, consider replacing those baked-in images and file downloads with live text and HTML layouts.
(side note: Website Carbon calculator and Ecograder are great tools for testing and benchmarking your page weight against industry averages).
Accessibility: Whether due to bandwidth restrictions or individual needs, not everyone will be able to engage with audio or visual content in the same way. Provide suitable alternatives such as transcripts and alt-text so important visual or audio information isn't lost, and ensure page flow is designed to facilitate speech-based browsing of content.
Communicate with purpose: Stay focused on the content that will help users make effective decisions by aligning messaging to your mission and purpose. Reinforce important information consistently throughout the journey, tailored where relevant tailored to specific audience needs. Page architecture and content should be structured and presented in an accessible, and easy to understand format to reduce unnecessary journey steps from lack of comprehension.
