Designing a Sustainable Digital Future: The Role of User Experience Designers

"Welcome to the Sustainability section of my portfolio. In this paper I explored the intersection of user experience (UX) design and sustainability."

I was lying in the burned grass in the backyard of our house in the Pacific Northwest, looking up at the gray sky that was not gray because of the clouds. A thick layer of gray smoke was hovering over the Seattle. The red sun was peeking through the layer of smoke, creating the color effect one can see on the images posted on social media. I took a deep breath to collect my mind and could not overlook the smell of the fire in the air. The smoke was blown miles away from Canada and was hovering above the Emerald City. I could not stop wondering how we got this far. Why do we let the fires worsen every year, and how did we end up with the grass in Seattle getting burned from excessive heat? The responsibility is on me, and on each of us, to do something about it. I asked myself if I had chosen the wrong profession or if I could do anything in terms of user experience design to mitigate the climate crisis. If book writers and songwriters can impact people and tell stories in a way to inspire people, then why wouldn't digital designers tell stories to inspire people?

It is nothing new that emails are a more environmentally friendly option than paper, but how much greener is the digital world? An article titled The carbon footprint of the internet which was published through ClimateCare discusses internet usage and its carbon footprint. The CEO of ClimateCare, Vaughan Lindsay, stated that the emissions produced by the energy consumed in the digital world is equivalent to the carbon emissions produced by the entire airline industry.

Similarly, Hurst, in the article How polluting is the internet? explains that internet consumption contributes towards 2% world's energy consumption. He argues that some researchers believe all equipment supporting internet consumption results in an even more significant amount, looking at around 10% of total electricity consumption.

Furthermore, the article Sustainable Web Design written by James Christie explains that the energy consumed by the internet results in 830 million tons of CO2 emissions per year. Keep in mind that with increasing digital consumption, this number is only growing higher and higher every year.

Hurst explains that large corporations are aware of the issue and find ways to invest in data centers supported by renewable energy sources. Furthermore, both Hurst and ClimateCare share multiple examples of how consumers can minimize their consumption. For instance, reducing consumption by unsubscribing to unnecessary emails or turning off digital products when not in use. I agree with the above suggestions playing a role in mitigating electricity consumption; however, I can't stop thinking about how we can prevent the issue in the first place.

What are some ways user experience designers can address the growing electricity consumption caused by the digital world? User experience designers hold the power to create digital products that help end-users perform tasks more effectively, which would result in less time spent on the website or using the software apps. Quality user experience can help reduce the total electricity levels consumed simply by providing more intuitive products that help users complete their tasks faster and more efficiently.

Let me share an example of how a thought-through digital user experience can minimize the user's electricity consumption. Imagine you are filling out a registration form on a website. The form consists of 20 fields which takes you about 5 minutes to complete. First, making the title of the fields clear, unambiguous, and concise can help reduce the time spent filling out the form. Moreover, a single date field with a date picker can be a fast way to fill in the date instead of three dropdown fields where you need to separately select day, month, and the year in the dropdown. Second, on the submit button, the user experience designer can ensure that if one of the 20 fields is incorrect, the page doesn't refresh and lose all the information the user has provided so far. Imagine spending 5 minutes filling out the form, just so after clicking the submit button, all your answers disappear due to a single answer using an unsupported character. User experience designers can provide a positive experience by ensuring that none of the information user-provided gets lost. UX designers can leverage best UX practices to timely and effectively provide feedback to the consumer without any data loss and with clear information how to recover.

By conducting user research and testing the products, user experience designers can help determine flaws and improve usability. It requires active listening to the end-user and implementing performance improvements. During the customer's feedback session, I learned that the date displayed in the table shows as time passed (e.g., 5 days ago) rather than the actual date (Sept 28, 2021). On hovering over the time passed, the customer can see the exact date. Hovering over each element to view the specific date is a time-consuming activity, especially when the customer compares a few times side by side. The user could spend their time doing other more important work rather than hovering over the dates to find accurate times. This is an example of how a simple representation of a date can affect the time spent by the user to complete their task.

According to James Christie's article Sustainable Web Design, we designed the web of increasingly demanding websites. He explains many actions can be taken to reduce the size of the websites, from optimizing images and using fewer animations to ensure websites perform faster and are smaller in size. The future is the optimized web that doesn't contain unnecessarily large files and design elements that provide little value to the end-user. Sustainable design compromises the quality and the number of visual elements that communicate the message to the user with the least amount of digital noise.

As user experience designers, we can focus on designing experiences that delight the users and contribute to end users' time effectively. Nobody wants to spend time in trial and error trying to learn how to navigate a complex system nor fill out information twice unnecessarily. Similarly, as every element in the digital interface contributes to cognitive load in users' minds, every single component of the interface also contributes to increased electricity consumption.

The action points mentioned above are suggestions that digital designers can take to mitigate the climate change crisis within their work field. Digital designers cannot save the world from climate crisis; however, I believe digital designers can take small steps towards a sustainable design future within the design industry. To conclude, I hope that this article conveys the message that if all of us want to step together to fight climate change, why shouldn't the experts within their industry focus on what each of us does best. Digital designers can provide designs and experiences that lower energy consumption in the digital world, while architects can design buildings with materials that have a more positive environmental impact, and restaurants can source local foods. If each of us finds a way to mitigate climate change within our profession and acts on it, I believe we have a much greater chance of saving society from the devastating consequences of climate change.