Medium impact ๐ฟ
Brainstorming allows you to flush out ideas before you commit to pursuing a path. Being considerate of not just your visitors but other individuals who may be affected by your product or service (including non-humans, like the environment!) is a useful practical exercise as it may influence your decisions in how you scope your project.
In the brainstorming process, consider all stakeholders using a human-centered approach.
In the brainstorming process, take the planetary needs and ecological boundaries into account.
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Medium impact ๐ฟ
When providing the option to download, save, print, or access anything online, defaulting to the most lightweight, least featureful version will reduce emissions through passive browsing; with non-essential information removed from the screen either to be shown when it's required or eliminated.
Prioritize performance optimization as a product or service's default approach.
The path taken to access the service (the initial contact with the website or service) should be as efficient and as simple as possible (time required to complete an action displayed, reducing too much choice, ensuring visitors know what's required at the start of a complex set of steps, etc).
Make your user-journey (when browsing an accessed website or service) as smooth as possible. User-research is key, as is building on established design patterns which people already understand.
Visitors can complete tasks without distractions or non-essential features getting in the way.
Visitors see only information that is relevant to their experience, without non-essential information being displayed on the screen.
Ensure that actionable information such as pop-up or modal windows can only be initiated by the visitor.
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Medium impact ๐ฟ
There are many variables which can impact the user-experience, and a bunch of these can impact how sustainable your website will be. Attempting to identify where you can make a difference to the visitor and give them a more sustainable experience will be beneficial.
List the negative external variables and identify where your product's sustainable impact can be diminished (systemic design).
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Medium impact ๐ฟ
When creating a product or service, identifying your target audience through user-research, analytics, data collected using ethical anonymous methods, or feedback from and with visitors is important in being able to create a customized service for and with them which is tailor-made for their specific preferences, adapted for any needs they may have, and particularly useful in helping a website or application evolve its service to meet sustainability targets.
Primary and secondary target visitors are identified, and their needs are defined through quantitative or qualitative research, testing, or analytics, ensuring your visitors and affected communities remain a close part of the research and testing process.
Potential visitor constraints like the device age, operating system version, browser, and connection speeds are considered when designing user-experiences.
The team has researched and identified whether a technical, material, or human constraint might require an adapted version of the product or service that reduces barriers or improves access to content.
In the user-research, identify with your visitors if some barriers should be removed (pain points or dark / deceptive design patterns).
When undertaking research, identifying needs, or conducting iterative design work, ensure that all stakeholders including your visitors have an equitable role in the decision-making process.
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Medium impact ๐ฟ
If you provide physical goods or services, you may also have to account for the sustainability impact of delivery services. This can often be tricky, but courier companies may provide useful tooling to help you identify emissions data for routing.
Consider and work with non-users and other stakeholders who might be passively impacted by a digital product or service, such as neighbors accepting parcels, traffic jams due to deliveries, etc. Research their needs and understand how they might be affected.
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Low impact ๐ฟ
While some things require the use of electricity, during the early ideation phase you could consider wireframing or rapid prototyping (using paper) among other offline tools to reduce energy consumption. Even the electronic versions of these may have a lower carbon cost than committing to building a full-blown experience for each idea.
Utilize wireframes, and rapid prototyping to quickly build consensus, reduce risk, and lower the number of resources needed to build features.
Involve your users within the iteration and design process using participatory design, and when conducting user-testing reach out to your community to help improve your product by allowing them to apply their knowledge and experience to your product or service.
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High impact ๐ฟ
It's great to have a pretty looking website or application, but to ensure a sustainable design, it's important to avoid cluttering up the interface with too many visuals (which aren't necessary to the content). Keeping a clean design will reduce website rendering, and thereby emissions.
Decorative design is used only when it improves the user-experience, and unnecessary assets or ones that fail to benefit the visitor or sustainability are removed (or rendered optional and disabled by default).
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Low impact ๐ฟ
Information architecture is a central part of the Web development process, and how you structure a website ensures that people can way-find your content easily. Having appropriately marked-up links within your product or service allows visitors, search engines and social networks to identify key information quickly.
Provide an accessible, easy-to-use navigation menu with search features that help visitors easily find what they need.
Implement an efficient (human-readable) sitemap that is organized and regularly updated helps search engines better index website content, which helps visitors more quickly find what they are looking for.
Provide a way for visitors to find out about new content and services.
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