?? Sustainable Design Patterns For UX Designers

Digital sustainability is often seen as a technical concern for engineers. We speak about optimization of assets, and web performance, and server efficiency. In fact, we rarely explore sustainability from the perspective of design and UX. But what if we did?

Let’s explore a few practical techniques to reduce waste, focus on what matters and declutter what doesn’t —?that you can apply to your work right away.

You can find more practical techniques in Measure UX ?? — a practical video course and live UX training on how to track design impact on business and define Design KPIs. Use a friendly code ?? LINKEDIN to save 15%.

What’s Sustainable UX Actually?

To many of us, sustainability seems to be a quite overloaded term. Indeed, it can mean many different things —?from efficiency and scale to reduced waste and clean energy. Typically, when we, as designers, speak about sustainability, typically mean at least 4 facets of it:

• Reducing waste, from producing unnecessary content to unnecessarily heavy content, PDFs, imagery, animations, video —?often installed as guardrails in CMS engines,
• Deleting outdated or misleading content: proactively removing and un-publishing unnecessary content or parts of the user journey,
• Maximize reusability, from UI components and design flows, to processes, templates and content outputs,
• Help people make more sustainable choices, with more sustainable defaults, presets, templates, e.g. by reducing the time on screen to complete critical tasks or key journeys.

Notably, most of our environmental impact happens on our user’s devices, so we can help our users by reducing waste and focusing on what matters. Below are the guidelines and principles I try to follow throughout my work to reduce waste.

The Actual Cost Of Digital

Digital is extraordinarily material- and waste-intense. This doesn’t come through usage, but rather through mining and manufacturing of materials that go into devices.

On average, a modern smartphone has 60–70 materials. These materials have to be mined and delivered and processed and pieced together. In fact, for a new phone to be produced, manufacturing requires 60kg of CO2, 300kg of mined toxic waste and approx. 14.000L of water.

For comparison, a new laptop costs around 300kg of CO2, 1.200kg of waste and 190.000L of water. Summing up the cost of digital together, we produce 100 billions tons of waste per year. This makes for half a Mount Everest of toxic waste, yearly.

We put our hopes in efficiency over time, yet in the past efficiency has never reduced consumption, but rather increased it. In fact, despite efficiency, data storage grows 28% annually, at the peak today, yet 90% of it is never used.

Getting Started: Sustainability Plan Template

To get started, we can use a helpful Sustainability Plan Template by Artiom Dashinsky and Antonia Kuyumji, a little starter kit to prepare a plan to the senior management and make a strong case on how to minimize waste, prompt reusability and create awareness about durability and sustainability:

• Company Sustainability Plan
• Sustainability Plan Template (Google Doc)

Employees who are passionate about sustainability can use it to prepare a sustainability action plan for their company and hopefully get a buy-in from the senior management. This could also be a good conversation starter to make company’s public commitments to sustainability more actionable and tangible.

Decarbonizing User Journeys

To improve our digital footprint, we need to measure how we are doing, and have a specific goal in mind that we keep move towards slowly but steadily. James Chudley has suggested to map parts of a user journey against its Carbon rating, along with targets we want to achieve. To do so, we can use a free Decarbonisation Management System proposed by James as well.

Personally, I love the idea of breaking down environmental targets against parts of a customer journey. However, it's worth keeping in mind that the environmental costs can be drastically reduced not only by the weight of the page, but by the usage time of the product. The faster we can get people through their tasks without mistakes, the lower the environmental impact of our product will be.

Sustainable Design Patterns

Sustainable Web Design is an incredibly comprehensive overview of 94 design guidelines and strategy recommendations to help teams create more sustainable digital products and services. The catalog is searchable and is broken down by categories and tags for a quick look-up.

Sustainable UX Toolkits

As designers, we often are left wondering how to integrate sustainable design practices into our design work. We don’t necessarily need to wait for a buy-in though. We can start establishing sustainable practices as a way of working. The repository on Sustainable UX Toolkits and Resources provides useful pointers on how to make sustainability a default throughout the entire product design process — from strategy and discovery to UI design and testing.

It includes toolkits, Figma templates, books, case studies, articles and events on sustainable UX — a wonderful growing repository to make big and small gains to align our work with sustainable design practices. One for the bookmarks!

You can also find more useful Figma and Miro templates in a post I’ve published recently: Sustainable Design Toolkits For UX Designers.

Sustainable Design Principles

How do we address it with our work? Since most of our environmental impact happens on our user’s devices, we can help our users by reducing waste and focusing on what matters:

1. Always choose the lightest mode of communication.
2. Encourage the reuse of existing templates and presets.
3. Auto-delete after 365 days what hasn’t been used once.
4. Discourage users from PDF exports in favor of shared URLs.
5. Always provide audio-only/transcript options for videos.
6. Be intentional with default settings for your users.
7. Highlight key insights to create understanding faster.
8. Skip unnecessary pages: drive users to results faster.
9. Establish an archiving/deletion policy in your company.
10. Show filters/presets in autocomplete, not just keywords.
11. Nudge users to delete their old files for 10% off that month.
12. Encourage and reward users for trying out the dark mode.
13. Aim to reduce session duration instead of increasing it.
14. Question font weights, stock images, parallax and 4K-videos.
15. Question the data collected, if it’s used and when it’s deleted.

Many of the ideas above are covered by the extensive IBM's sustainability handbook, that (among many other things) also includes a checklist for sustainability. It's worth noting though that sustainability isn’t about compliance, but about applying a sustainable mindset to our practices. Nevertheless, it’s a fantastic overview to get started.

Digital Is Physical and Material

As Gerry McGovern says, digital is intensely physical and material. It has a severe cost of cooling, mining, water use and toxic waste. So optimize relentlessly. Help people get things done faster.

Individual actions drive changes at scale, but they need a momentum. And often that momentum comes through small changes: new default settings, reduced time on task, or showing key insights, rather than all data. That’s also just good usability that can have tangible impact for users and businesses.

Most importantly: whenever possible, hold on to your devices as long as possible, and encourage your customers to do the same. And if a meeting helps you reduce wasteful work done by 20 people, it’s the time worth taking.

Useful Resources

• Sustainable Web Design Patterns
• Experimenting towards a more sustainable website, by Alan Colville
• Sustainable Product Design (+ Template), by Artiom Dashinsky
• Getting Started With Sustainability, by Michelle Barker
• Sustainable UX, by Thorsten Jonas , SUX
• Sustainable Design Toolkits And Frameworks, by Cosima Mielke, Geoff Graham
• Design For Sustainability Checklist, by IBM
• Sustainable Toolkits For UX Designers, by yours truly

Books Recommendations

• Sustainable Web Design, by Tom Greenwood
• World Wide Waste,?by Gerry McGovern
• Design Is The Solution, by Nathan Shedroff
• Ethical Design Handbook, by Trine Falbe, Kim Andersen, Martin Michael Frederiksen

People To Follow on LinkedIn

• Alan Colville
• Michelle Barker
• Thorsten Jonas
• Sandy D?hnert
• Jon Gibbins
• Paola Miani

New Course: How To Measure UX and Design Impact

You can find more practical techniques in Measure UX ?? — a practical video course and live UX training on how to track design impact on business and define Design KPIs. Use a friendly code ?? LINKEDIN to save 15%.

Thank you so much for your support, everyone —?and happy designing! ????