Strategic Service Design
I’ve made a tool (in Miro) to help you benchmark your web sustainability maturity using the W3C’s Web Sustainability Guidelines.
The idea is to evaluate your progress against each of the guidelines as a team to benchmark where you are today and to see where you need to improve.
This is very much a prototype but feels like it’s got legs. Please help yourself to a copy (just duplicate the board), have a play with it and I’d love any feedback to help improve it!
After a recent trip to the ‘More than human’ exhibition at the Design museum I felt inspired to make something.
One particular exhibit, ‘Nature Calendar’ by Marcus Coates really captured my imagination.
His calendar simply lists specific events that happen in the natural world throughout the year in the UK.
I love the idea of having a daily reminder of things that are happening in the natural world, to help shift our thoughts from the everyday, to offer perspective and to remind us of the amazing things that are happening around us.
I thought I’d have a crack at making my own digital version.
It’s been fun (and painful) trying to make it work and fun experimenting with various AI tools to try and bring something to life.
The real joy has been researching the different natural events and discovering the concept of phenology (the study of cyclic and seasonal natural phenomena).
My aim is to convey both what is happening and importantly how the timing of things is changing due to our warming climate.
It’s still a prototype (well isn’t everything) but the 1st September felt like a good day to release it into the world, so here’s ‘NatureNow‘
If you ‘save to home screen’ from your mobile browser (via the share option in your browser) it acts as an app so you can easily check out what is going on every day.
Hopefully it’ll help you to daydream while on the bus, take the edge off that nasty deadline and help you tune into what’s going around you.
Enjoy!
For the last year or so I’ve been on a mission to try and reduce the environmental impact of the internet.
Here are some of the resources that I’ve compiled along the way that I’ve found useful and inspiring along with some of my own work that they have all helped shape in some way.
I hope you find them useful.
Books:
Website Carbon Calculators:
Useful articles & presentations:
Web resources:
Useful videos:
I had a great time chatting to Marc on the Service Design Show podcast recently about all things sustainability, service design and decarbonising user journeys.
Earlier this year, Richard Masters , Chief Executive at the Premier League, launched their Environmental Sustainability strategy.
It focusses on three key priorities :
As a football fan and someone on a mission to reduce the environmental impact of the internet this caught my eye.
Many people don’t realise that the internet is responsible for higher global greenhouse gas emissions than the aviation industry.
With over 60% of the global population now spending 40% of their waking hours online, this trend is set to continue leading to predictions that the internet will be responsible for 40% of global greenhouse emissions by 2040.
Given these alarming figures I wonder if the Premier League are prioritising or even aware of the potential carbon footprint of the club websites in relation to their decarbonisation objectives?
Club websites serve huge global fanbases and are typically content heavy, particularly with images and videos which are energy-intensive to store and transfer to users’ devices.
Multiple this usage across the 20 Premier League club websites and the cumulative impact of millions of page loads results in a significant carbon footprint.
So this all got me thinking…
Who would win the Premier League if the winner was the club the smallest website carbon footprint?
I chatted to the folks at Cardamon about the idea and they kindly offered evaluate the websites using their carbon calculator.
To make the results comparable, we calculated the carbon footprint of 10,000 visits to the homepages of each site (clearly the footprint of the entire websites will be significantly higher).**
And the results are in!
So hats off to Man City for having the lowest homepage carbon footprint, but let’s face it they’re the best of a bad bunch.
It’s no surprise that Ipswich are anchored to the bottom of the table given their hefty 29 MB homepage.
If the Premier League are serious about meeting their sustainability goals then decarbonising club websites must be a key part of their strategy.
Even a tactical focus on switching them all to green hosting would make a huge difference and feels like a simple tap in.
The benefits of low carbon websites extend far beyond the environment.
Low carbon websites are deliberately designed to be as simple as possible making them easier to use, download faster and available to more people.
Their simplicity means they are more efficient, effective and use less energy – making them better for people, performance, planet and profit.
How much do you know about the carbon footprint of your websites and what is being done within your organisation to minimise it?
What risk does ignoring your digital carbon footprint pose to your reputation, values or wider sustainability goals?
I’d argue a very significant one.
The climate crisis demands that every responsible organisation should make a plan to minimise the environmental impact of their digital product and services, but many simply don’t know where to start.
I’ve created some simple and practical free tools that will help get the ball rolling:
It would be wonderful to see a very different story in the table next year, seeing the reds, blues and lilywhites becoming greener.
I hope this helps to nudge the clubs in the right direction to minimise the environmental impact of their websites.
If anyone needs advice, help kicking off or hands-on support with any of this I’m here to help – just drop me a line.
cc Will Hutton Ellen Shaddock Pete Bradshaw Hannah Mansour James Beale Tom H. Chris Goodwin Rishi Jain Charlotte Miell Helen Hughes Eloise Thompson AIEMA Marcus Parry Max Wilkes-Barker Alex Evans Jesse Foyle Katie Cross
**Cardamon runs with ad blocking on so the impact of adverts on these websites are not included in the results
Thanks again to Adam Newman and the crew at Cardamon for running the numbers for me – here’s the full data set
It’s wonderful to see the Government Digital Service add ‘Minimise Environmental Impact‘ to their design principles for best practice in relation to digital services.
But what exactly should digital professionals do in order to minimise their environmental impact?
To help people get started, I’ve created a ‘Digital Sustainability Strategy’ template (Google doc) that lists a number of activities that will help you reduce both the environmental and societal impacts of your digital services.
Use the template to plan how you will accomplish each of the recommended activities, who will do what and deadlines for when they need to be completed.
🙏 Huge thanks to Tim Frick for reviewing and improving an earlier version, Alex M H Smith for your inspiring strategy related content, Mark Shayler for your awesome advice on strategic tools in your book ‘You Can’t Make Money From a Dead Planet‘ and Natalie MacLees for your awesome plain English accessibility work and her ethos of ‘building in public’.
I had the pleasure recently of giving a talk on Decarbonising User Journeys at UX Glasgow at their ‘How to Design for Sustainability’ event.
Check out the UX Glasgow website for links to the resources that I mentioned in the talk and here’s a recording of the presentation.
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:
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?
Useful resources:
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?
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?
Useful resources:
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?
Useful resources:
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?
Useful resources:
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.
I’m on a mission to help reduce the environmental impact of the internet.
I’ve created a new approach that I’m calling ‘Decarbonising User Journeys‘.
It has been designed to give you a pragmatic method to help you deliver faster, simpler and more effective user journeys that have less impact on the environment.
I’m over the moon to launch it here and would love to hear your feedback, questions and experiences of using it. 🚀
This presentation tells the story of why we need to urgently decarbonise the internet, the thinking behind the approach and explains how you can start to decarbonise your own user journeys.
It is deliberately simple, jargon free and designed to give digital professions the tools they need to take positive steps to accelerate change.
Please join me in my mission, help spread the word and start decarbonising your user journeys! 💪
The digital industry is responsible for higher global emissions than the aviation industry so it’s imperative that we reduce the our environmental impact.
I’ve created a free ‘Digital Sustainability Checklist’ based on W3C’s ‘Web Sustainability Guidelines’ to help you prioritise, track and report on your digital sustainability efforts.
Knowing where to start with long lists of guidelines can feel overwhelming so I’ve created this checklist to help you:
✅ Prioritise which guidelines to work on : Use the ‘Impact’ vs ‘Effort’ matrix to help you to decide where to concentrate your efforts
✅ Improve your digital sustainability : Track your progress as you design and implement your products and services in more sustainable ways
✅ Evaluate your progress : Evaluate your performance against each guideline to highlight your strengths and weaknesses
Let me know how you get on with it and I’d love to hear your ideas to improve it.
💥 Get the Digital Sustainability Checklist (Google Sheets)💥
(To make your own copy go to File > Make a copy)
Please share this with your network if you find it useful to help spread the word!
Good luck! 💪
James Chudley 