Decarbonising the Premier League

Earlier this year, Richard Masters , Chief Executive at the Premier League, launched their Environmental Sustainability strategy.

It focusses on three key priorities :

  1. To become net zero by 2040
  2. To support decarbonisation across the league
  3. To raise awareness of climate change

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!

A league table containing all of the premier league football teams ranked by the carbon footprint of their club website. The club with the lowest homepage carbon footprint is Manchester City and the club with the largest homepage carbon footprint is Ipswich Town. The table show the carbon emissions and energy usage from 10,000 visits to each of their homepages and whether they are using green hosting or not. The full ranking (best to worst) is Manchester City, Everton, Arsenal, Chelsea, West Ham, Manchester United, Wolves, Southampton, Crystal Palace, Liverpool, Aston Villa, Fulham, Leicester City, Bournemouth, Brighton, Newcastle United, Spurs, Brentford and Ipswich Town.
The Premier League of website homepage carbon emissions

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

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.

So what about the carbon footprint of your own website?

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

Use this free template to build your digital sustainability strategy

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’.

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.
A table showing the results from various online tools such as Google Lighthouse, Website Carbon Calculator and Ecograder that calculate benchmarking data such as carbon footprint, performance data, page weights etc from a set of web pages that make up a user journey.
Your benchmarking results will help you to understand your impact and prioritise your decarbonising efforts

Useful resources:

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?

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:

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:

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.

The image show a graph with impact on the y axis (from low to high) and time on the x axis. It shows how organisations can move from a position where they are unsustainable (doing more harm than good) to being sustainable and then ultimately regenerative, where they are doing more good than harm.
The journey towards regenerative design

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:

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.

Decarbonising User Journeys

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! 💪

Inter(net) zero

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! 💪

Nature Inspired Innovation

I had the absolute pleasure of giving a talk at UXScotland last week with Stu Church on ‘Nature Inspired Innovation – Designing the Future by Using Lessons from the Past’.

The talk emerged from a pub conversation where we both realised we had been mulling over similar ideas and it was great to have a super smart collaborator to work with to bring it to life.

It’s about learning from natural systems and applying those lessons to help to answer challenging questions such as :

  • How much should you innovate?
  • How fast should you innovate?
  • Why do products look so similar?
  • Why might people not choose the most efficient designs?

I think it’s really valuable and enjoyable to look for answers to the problems we face in our work in unexpected places. This talk, if anything else, was a useful reminder that the answers are often hidden in plain sight!

How to optimise your service experience

I’ve created a method that enables service owners to evaluate and optimise their services based on the things that matter the most to their service users.

The approach focusses on identifying the qualities that your service must offer in order for it to deliver the best experience for the people who use it.

In this short talk I share the background to the approach, the 100 qualities of great service experiences and a simple 5 step method that you can use to optimise your own service experiences.

Short Form Brief Template

I find writing short form briefs to be really valuable, particularly when I haven’t been involved with setting up the project or winning the work.

I find the rigour of attempting to answer important questions really useful to check my understanding, keep me honest and to highlight gaps in my knowledge.

I typically write them as soon as possible after project kick off’s and share early versions with the team to check what I’ve misunderstood, get answers to fill the gaps and critically to created a shared understanding of what we’re trying to do and why we’re doing it.

They are also really useful to refer back to when projects inevitably go a bit wonky as a useful aide memoir and informal contract of sorts.

Here’s a simple template I always start with to help you on your way. Do also read Jared Spool’s brilliant article on the topic ‘The Magical Short Form Brief‘ as it’s the perfect primer.

8< – – – – – – – – – – –

[Project Name]
Short Form Brief
[Author] [Date] [Version]

Project objective 
[Why are you doing the work? What problem/s are you trying to solve? What is the value of solving the problem?] 
 
Scope 
[What is in and out of scope?] 

High level approach 
[What are you planning to do & why? Which roles will be working on it?] 

Hypotheses
[What hypotheses do stakeholders believe are true that you wish to learn more about?] 

Guiding Principles 
[What are the guiding principles that we will use that will govern the spirit of the approach that we take?] 

Assumptions 
[What assumptions have we made that have influenced our thinking and approach?] 

Key Outcomes 
[What outcomes is the project team aiming to achieve?] 

Measures of Success 
[What will you measure that will indicate whether the work has been successful or not?] 

Free download of ‘Smashing UX Design’

Jesmond and I wrote ‘Smashing UX Design’ back in 2012 and after a few years it sadly went out of print.

I quickly regretted giving so many copies away when the prices then soared on eBay! ; )

After finding the PDF of the book during a recent clear out we decided that it makes no sense for it to not be set free!

So enjoy reading ‘Smashing UX Design’! (43mb PDF)

We hope you find it useful!