Homepage image from wattzon

User Experience Designers have a direct impact (their work) and an indirect impact (usage of their designs) on the environment we live in.
The latter is especially important: Since designers influence the behaviour of users through their designs, good or bad design decisions can multiply the good or bad effect it might have on the environment.

In the following, I will show a few examples of environmental sustainability in User Experience Design.

The UX work

I will keep this short, you know how it goes.

There are many ways to reduce the footprint of an office: Swap to a green energy provider, use less paper or avoid it at all, separate and reduce your waste and get a green hosting service (The carbon footprint of date centres, where websites are running on, adds up to half a per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions – and that was in 2007.)
Try to avoid traveling – especially flying, which accounts to the main part of carbon emissions with many companies. There are plenty of collaboration tools like video conferencing / web presentations, collaborative docs, cloud project management etc that can render travel unnecessary.

If you want to raise environmental consciousness in your office, you might find this project by Frog Design interesting. For a two-week period attendees were not allowed to use a trash bin. Everything that was not appropriate for the offices waste separation had to be collected and kept, with an interesting outcome.

The Design

Whether you design for a web service, a marketing site or an app, you will influence the user’s behaviour, which again will usually have an effect on the environment. So you are in a position to reduce the environmental impact of many people with the design decisions you make.

Learn & Integrate
If you want to design sustainably you first need to now where the problems are. Inform yourself about global sustainability issues and issues that are specific to your service or your client’s business (see reading recommendation at the bottom).
If you know the issues and how to tackle them, keep this in mind during every step of the design process, from research and strategy to designing and testing. Proactively talk to your client or project owner to add possible feature requests to backlogs or design schedules.

Transparency
The easiest way of influencing users’ behaviour is to make them aware of the environmental impact of their decisions.
For example if you design for a shop, tell users about the eco-balance of the products. Don’t tell them only about the good things. Naming a product green for only a few green features will likely be perceived as greenwashing. Honesty in a topic users actually care about, will be appreciated and establish a trust relationship that will give you a competitive advantage in the long run.

Patagonia is one of the few companies that try to be really transparent, talking about why their product is good, why it’s bad and what they will try to improve in future.

Sourcemap is an open platform that lets users collect supply chain data of existing products, so that consumers can make more sustainable choices.

Education
Usually ecological information like the origin of a product, energy consumption or material is quite abstract to users. You don’t know if this information is good or bad, if you don’t know its actual effect on the environment and health or if you can’t compare it.
On WattzOn users can compare their energy footprint with the footprint of other users or the average user. This puts the user’s energy consumption into context and helps users to find a solution to reduce their footprint.

WattzOn also lets you see the equivalent of the energy-consumption to the actual release of CO2. This is a nice idea, but still very abstract. A better solution would be to show how many trees you need to metabolize this amount CO2 in a certain time range.

Persuasion
Now that users know about the ecologic consequences of their decisions, you can do a little more to support users to act sustainably.
Let users set goals to be more sustainable or reward them with batches or points, if they act sustainably. Sharing this with their friends might add some peer- pressure to the game. If the way that leads to a sustainable life is more playful and about achieving something and less about relinquishment, it will more likely be chosen.

Canadian company Team North developed the North House, a sustainable solar-powered house, with mobile and web apps for customers to manage their home. While the apps give users instant information about their consumption in a comprehensive and emotional way, inhabitants can set up personal goals or challenges with their friends to reduce waste or energy consumption. Winners of challenges receive batches, which will potentially encourage the whole network to do even more.

Backward compatibility
Devices like laptops or phones lose their value and urge users to buy new ones when new software doesn’t run on the device anymore – for instance, Apple stopped software support for the first iPhone not even three years after release. Keeping older device generations in mind doesn’t necessarily affect your design, but helps extending their usage till the next hardware upgrade, which saves material and production resources.

Support many platforms
Many people still print out webpages, mainly because they want to read it in a more comfortable situation or on the go. Supporting different screen sizes might reduce this need. People can now read it on their tablet or mobile phone. There is no need to build apps for every device out there. Responsive web design or cross platform HTML 5 based apps are easily developed alternatives.

Lightweight web design
When heavy websites – in terms of byte size – are viewed, they raise energy consumption of data centres. But also unused files and pages need energy, when they are hosted on servers.
The designer can help keep websites small by following a minimalistic approach to web design, which is usually also good for user experience.
Try to avoid showing interface elements or text as images. Try to go with a design that can be coded with standard HTML and CSS. Use images and videos selectively and with a good compression (especially background images). This will also make the site faster, which adds to a good user experience.
Also talk with your developers to get a lightweight website going. You can test it with tools like Google Page Speed.
Smashing Mag also had a good piece on this topic.

Think outside the box
User experience doesn’t stop after the digital service. H&M online shop for example sends infographics with their packages so that users will make the original package smaller, if they want to return only part of the delivery. That helps reducing greenhouse gases and H&M’s postage costs. via uxzentrisch

Further information

The Designers Accord is ‘a global coalition of designers, educators, and business leaders working together to create a positive environmental and social impact.’ They give good advice on how to bring sustainability into your design work. Everybody involved in design in general can join for free. Design firms can be part of the Design Firm Directory.

Design Can Change is an educational website that helps designers learn about environmental issues and and act more sustainable. It also features a Designers directory.

The Story of Stuff is a project by Annie Leonard, comprehensibly illustrating the whole production and consumption process. There are very nice, free short films and also educational material and books. She recently tackled electronics, cosmetics and bottled water.

Cradle to Cradle is a book by William McDonough & Michael Braungart. They describe solutions for a sustainable world by going beyond just trying to reduce the bad effects on the environment (eco-efficiency), and instead promote a complete elimination of the bad effect through better design (eco-effectiveness).

Ecobuild is the world’s largest event for sustainable design, construction and built environment with 600 speakers and 1200 exhibitors – happening in London March 2012.