Simple steps to decarbonise your user journeys

I was shocked to learn that internet is responsible for higher carbon emissions than the aviation industry.

It’s vital that we minimise the environmental impact of our digital products, but knowing where to start and what to do can feel overwhelming.

To help accelerate change, I’ve scoured the W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines and extracted some key priority areas that I’ve turned into a simple action plan to help you decarbonise your user journeys.

It doesn’t cover everything but will to help you get off and running.

This is about progress over perfection after all.

So here’s the plan:

1. Benchmark your carbon footprint
2. Switch to a green hosting provider
3. Offer the best possible user experience
4. Make everything as simple and lightweight as possible
5. Focus on doing more good than harm

1. Benchmark your carbon footprint

You need to benchmark your emissions to get a clear idea of how your journey is performing, where the problems are and to help you plan and prioritise your decarbonisation efforts.

How?

• There are loads of great free tools you can use like The Website Carbon Calculator, Ecograder, Cardamon and Google Lighthouse to benchmark useful data such as your carbon footprint, performance, page weight and carbon rating.
• I’ve mocked up this simple dashboard to demonstrate how you can visualise this benchmarking data to help you to see how well your user journey is performing and identify where you need to focus your decarbonising efforts.

Useful resources:

• ‘Website Carbon Calculators‘ by Daniel Hartley
• ‘Ecograder and Your Web Sustainability Score‘ by Mightybytes, Certified B Corp

2. Switch to a green hosting provider

The level of pollution from your user journeys will depend on the carbon intensity of the energy that is used to power them.

Switching to a hosting provider that is powered by green energy will help to make your corner of the internet fossil-free.

How?

• Check if your website runs on Green energy provided by the Green Web Foundation
• Find a verified green hosting provider by using the Green Web Directory

3. Offer the best possible user experience

When things are easy to use we spend less time doing them, using less energy as a result.

By ensuring user journeys are useful we can justify the resources we use to create and operate them and by making them accessible we ensure everyone has access to them.

Your objective should be to make your user journey as useful, usable and accessible as possible.

How?

• Conduct regular user research on a range of devices to ensure you understand user needs and how and where you need to improve your user journeys.
• Aim for people to be able to successfully complete their tasks first time around without wasting time and energy through errors, needing support or spending more time than necessary trying to do what they are trying to do.
• Aim to meet the highest level of accessibility compliance possible to ensure the widest possible audience can access and benefit from your service.
• Remove anything that is distracting or detracts from people being able to complete their tasks and do everything possible to help them.
• Use established design patterns that people will be familiar with and already know how to use.
• Always write in plain English and check the average reading age you are writing for (in the UK it’s between 9-11 years old).

Useful resources:

• Follow the relevant guidance from the ‘At a Glance’ summaries of the W3C Web Sustainable Guidelines
• Explore the Sustainable UX resource collection
• W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

4. Make everything as simple and lightweight as possible

Lightweight pages download faster and consume less energy to be stored and transferred across networks. They will work better in areas with poor connectivity and for users with older devices helping to maximise the amount of people who can access your service during challenging circumstances.

Fundamentally people won’t tolerate slow page loading times and if forced to wait will simply go elsewhere.

How?

• Reduce – Be ruthless and remove anything (content, pages, scripts, images, features etc.) that isn’t providing any value by questioning the purpose of every element (use these questions to help you).
• Replace – Look for alternative ways of communicating the same information using lighter weight alternatives. Be particularly careful with using video and AI given how resource intensive they are.
• Optimise – Ensure that assets such as images, videos, fonts, downloads, animations are suitably optimised to minimise their file size.
• Think ‘Mobile first’ – Adopt a ‘mobile first’ mindset to help you ensure that people using the smallest screens with poor network connections can still access, use and benefit from your services.

Useful resources:

• Work through the recommendations from your benchmarking reports i.e. Google Lighthouse, Ecograder, Website Carbon Calculator etc to minimise your environmental impact and maximise you performance
• ‘20 Ways to Make your Website More Energy Efficient‘ by Tom Greenwood
• ‘Ecodesign for Digital Services‘ by Anne FAUBRY & Aurélie Baton
• Follow the relevant guidance from the ‘At a Glance’ summaries of the W3C Web Sustainable Guidelines

5. Focus on doing more good than harm

Sustainable services are those that do no harm. We must do better. We should aim to provide regenerative services that do more good than harm and result in a net positive impact on the economy, society and the environment.

Being open about your digital sustainability progress and honest about your successes, failures and plans builds trust and helps your customers to make informed choices about the impact of using your services.

How?

• Ensure your business models, values and organisational strategic intent is focussed on acting the best interests of people and planet.
• Be respectful of people’s time, energy and the effort required of them to use your services.
• Ensure people are in full control of their data and are only asked to share the minimum amount of personal information possible.
• Ensure no unintended consequences occur as a result of your service.
• Don’t use manipulative or deceptive patterns and seek to minimise the time and mental effort required to use your service.
• Publish a digital sustainability statement that clearly communicates your impact, the work you’ve done to reduce it and the improvement areas that you will be working on next.
• Add a Website Carbon Badge to to automatically calculate and display the carbon emissions of each page or your website.

Useful resources:

• Deceptive Patterns Hall of Shame by Harry Brignull
• Digital Sustainability Statement from Unilever written by Marketa Benisek
• Towards Regenerative Design – Are we being good digital ancestors?
• Follow the relevant guidance from the ‘At a Glance’ summaries of the W3C Web Sustainable Guidelines

Remember, the spirit of the approach is progress over perfection, so start small and focus on continuous improvement.

Your digital product will never be perfect, but every change you make will help to minimise your environmental impact.