The climate stripes created by Professor Ed Hawkins are one of the most effective pieces of communication design I’ve ever seen.
They work so well because they make an invisible problem visible, helping people to immediately understand climate change in a simple and visually appealing way.
Decarbonising digital services
Digital services have a significant and growing environmental impact, driven primarily by the energy required to store, transfer and render data.
Unfortunately, most of this impact remains invisible to the people who are responsible for them.
I’ve been working on an approach called ‘decarbonising user journeys’ to make this impact easier to understand and manage.
The principle behind it is simple.
Reduce the weight and energy demand of the pages that make up key digital user journeys in order to reduce the overall environmental impact of the service.
Using tools such as the Website Carbon Calculator, you can calculate the energy efficiency of individual pages and identify where the biggest problems are.
I’ve been experimenting with ways to visualise this information using energy efficiency ratings that people are familiar with from everyday things like household appliances to rate web pages.
It worked reasonably well but I kept thinking about the simplicity and effectiveness of the climate stripes.
It got me thinking, could a series of stripes be used to visualise the energy efficiency of a digital user journey?
Introducing Webstripes
I’ve been working with the awesome Jon Gibbins to automate the capture of website energy efficiency data and used some of this data to create the website equivalent of the climate stripes.
I’ve called it Webstripes.
Each stripe represents the energy efficiency of an individual web page that makes up a digital user journey.
I liked the impact of my first attempt but it’s not great if you’re colourblind so I created a better version that more clearly communicates the relationship between page weight and energy efficiency and doesn’t rely on colour to convey information.
Shorter stripes represent lighter, more energy efficient pages.
Longer stripes represent heavier, less energy efficient pages.
Environmental impact data is often too complicated and confusing.
People can’t (and won’t) act upon things they don’t understand.
I’ve seen first hand how powerful simple visuals such as experience maps can be within organisations to drive positive change.
Webstripes can help teams to quickly identify problem areas and help them focus their optimisation efforts to make the reds turn green.
Beyond human centred design
Human centred design helped make digital services useful, usable and desirable.
But if we only optimise for people, without considering the wider impacts of our work we risk designing services that are harming the environment.
Our work must now focus beyond human centred design.
Learning how to do this effectively has to be our priority given the climate emergency and proliferation of digitisation within our every day lives.
I’ll be sharing more about this in my talk on ‘Beyond Human Centred Design’ at UX Scotland in June.
And if you’d like me to create Webstripes for your own user journeys, do get in touch.
James Chudley 