We as designers have an incredible amount of power for more ecological and social sustainability. We just have to use it.

You might know about the meaning of sustainability in general. In the broadest sense, sustainability refers to the ability to maintain or support something continuously and make it last.

In the past months the term “sustainability” became a synonym for “ecological”. And while I deeply believe that we need to become more ecological in our digital product design, we also have to look at sustainability from different standpoints.

So, what does sustainable UX/UI Design mean?

Sustainable UX (User Experience) and UI (User Interface) Design needs to be referred to in an ecological as well as social way. We need to care for minimizing the negative impact on our environment and our society. And we need to cater for maximizing the positive impact on both of them.

One great method to dig deeper is with the Doughnut Tech Diagram. The flower diagram represents social foundations in its inner circle and ecological boundaries on its outer rim.

The Digital Tech Industry Doughnut Flower by Doing the Doughnut Tech.

Another method to look at various sustainability factors is with the global UN Sustainable Development Goals (short “SDGs”). The selection of goals contains 17 areas of interest for a healthier planet and society.

The 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals

What can we do with ecological and social sustainability in UX and UI design?

Let’s have a look at 4 different areas in digital product design and see their environmental as well as social sustainability possibilities.

• Sustainable UX Research
• Sustainable UX Architecture
• Sustainable UI Design
• Sustainable Communications

All four topics go hand in hand and are each part of the whole sustainable UX/UI Design package.

Sustainable UX Research

We have plenty of great tools and methods in UX Research already. Let’s use them for the good.

Ecologically sustainable UX Research

• Stakeholder Mapping: Map out all stakeholders that you want to address (your target audience) as well as the ones that are ecologically impacted by your project (animals and the environment). Because each and every project has an impact on our nature and planet. The impacted stakeholders could be the Atlantic Ocean, Los Angeles as a city, European forests, Mother Nature in general or anything else that comes to mind.
• Non-human Personas: Create Persona profiles for those impacted stakeholders. Get into the Persona’s needs and desires, and see the positive and negative impact we have on this stakeholder. This method is the most eye opening that I’ve encountered so far and helps tremendously to build up empathy for our impacted ecosystems and animals. Really, the Aha-moments are incredible! You can learn how to create them with my podcast episode on the magic of non-human Personas as well as with my blog article about Mother Nature as a Persona. Use my free templates on Miro, Figma or as PDF to get a quick start into it and read even more about it from the brilliant Monika Sznel and Damien Lutz.
• User Journey Mapping: You already create Customer Journey Maps or User Journey Maps? Integrate additional lanes. One for the ecological needs, one for ecological opportunities and one for ecological regeneration ideas. This way you have your sustainability endeavors right in your decision process. You can read more about it in my blog article on Environment Centered User Journey Maps.

There’s of course other methods you can use for ecological UX Research. That could be building nature into your Empathy Maps, Impact Maps, Business Model Canvases, and many more.

Socially sustainable UX Research

• Stakeholder Mapping: Map out all stakeholders that you want to address (your target audience) as well as the ones that are socially impacted by your project. Build empathy for all humans who might benefit or suffer from your product. That includes all non-users that have to deal with someone using the product (e.g. family, friends, pedestrians, co-workers, etc.). It also includes people with impairments, different cultural backgrounds, different body shapes and skin tones or different educational backgrounds you haven’t thought of.
• Non-user Personas: Create Persona profiles for impacted non-users. Get into the Persona’s frustrations and wishes. See the positive and negative impact the project has on these stakeholders. Damien Lutz describes the method really well in his article.
• Usability testing: Test your digital products with people who have visual or physical impairments, people who are from other cultures, people with different educational backgrounds, people of various genders and many more. Include a wide range to ensure healthy digital products.
• User Journey Mapping: Integrate additional lanes for the social needs, opportunities and ideas into your User Journey Maps. This way you have your social endeavors always visible.

When applying those social UX Research methods, you create much better digital products. Benefits can be a larger target group, greater possibilities for users to actually buy or use your digital product, and a socially healthier product in itself.

Sustainable UX Architecture

Ecologically sustainable UX Architecture

You probably know that every click on a web page or web product starts a dialogue with data centers somewhere in the world. Those data centers are fed with an insane amount of electricity and cooled with vast amounts of often drinkable water (or again electricity). This leads to high CO² emissions. In fact, a single web page consumes an average of 1.67 gram of CO2 per page view. Think about how many billions of web pages and other digital products are out there. That’s a lot of CO², that’s being produced. Just by website, email and app clicks.

• Minimizing the negative impact of UX: We need to reduce our CO² and energy impact. This is possible with using less images, less videos, no auto-play videos, less interactions and less other data-heavy components. Do we really have to have hundreds of images? Can’t we integrate lazy loading, so pictures only load when the user scrolls down? Do we really need to send constant push notifications? Is there no option for focus modes and offline times?
• Maximizing the positive impact of UX: Think about great usability, easy to understand content, intuitive short click paths, green delivery options, packaging-free variants, CO² displays in web shops, sustainable products promoted, fuel-efficient travel routes, sustainable default options and many more.

Socially sustainable UX Architecture

• Mental health: The biggest health issue in today’s societies is mental health. And we as designers are part of the problem. We need to stop creating an insecure, over-consuming, frustrated and skeptical society. Just think about having a hard day, being stressed from our current world crises, having a newborn baby that is crying and you haven’t slept in days. Being sick and needing medication. Your eyes are swollen and your nose is just running. And then this website or application triggers you with hundreds of pop-ups, animations, manipulative patterns, shameful cancellation screens and false scarcities. Your heart is racing. You feel it? Great! So, don’t use those methods in your products and designs. If you’re keen on learning more about it, read my blog post on how to stop stressing your users.
• Accessibility: Care for how different people of different ages and impairments behave on websites. Cater for users with screen readers and limited eye sight. Ensure that neurodivers users can use your product. People with hearing struggles, with physical challenges, with temporary health issues, with cognitive impairments, etc.
• Equality: Ensure that your UX is based on gender, ethnicity, educational, cultural, religion and other equality. This means, integrating different kinds of gender (also non-binary), acknowledging indigenous, addressing needs, wishes and frustrations of all people. That counts especially for forms, email salutations and gender equal copy writing.

Sustainable UI Design

Ecologically sustainable UI Design

Similarly to the ecologically sustainable UX Architecture, we want to reduce our digital footprint in our UI Design as well.

To minimize our footprint we can get creative with low-data components such as icons, illustrations, shapes, forms and colors. Ecologically sustainable UI also counts for optimizing, scaling and compressing our images and videos. It’s about having consistent UI elements. It also addresses the amount and types of fonts you use (best option using preinstalled system fonts or compressing your fonts). And, last but not least, ecological UI additionally has a look on energy efficient colors which you can find more info on in my blog article on energy efficient color palettes. (Hint: It is all about OLED displays.)

Socially sustainable UI Design

Design for everyone. Not just for healthy, cis-gender, white, privileged people (nothing against this group!).

• Diversity: Show a diverse spectrum of people in your UI Design. Integrate people of various skin tones, heritages, genders (also non-binary), cultural backgrounds, age groups, religion, body shapes, educational backgrounds and with impairments. All humans matter.
• Accessibility: Ensure great readability, visual ease and distinction. Especially for people with dyslexia, color blindness or visual impairments, just to name a few. It comes with color and typo selection, text structures, options for a dark mode, icons for error and info messages, and much more.

Sustainable communication

Ecologically sustainable communication

Raise awareness for ecological sustainability. Talk about your values, your efforts, your mission and your actions. Create campaigns for less consumption. Address ecological issues and solutions. It’s about really thinking through, how you can communicate ecological sustainability with your users and customers.

A lot of companies and brands are actually concerned to talk about their taken sustainability efforts. They feel that it’s never enough. Yes, they are still on their path. We are all on our path. All the time. There is no perfection in sustainability. But the perfect transparency is in fact to talk about what you have done already, where you stand now and what goal you might have in the future. You will show yourself as open for discussions, learning and knowledge. There will always be new aspects of sustainability, that we have to keep learning about.

Socially sustainable communication

Raise awareness for social sustainability. Discuss social issues, create campaigns for social events and let people donate to social causes. Plant little seeds for positive social impact and let those seeds grow.

Communicate ethically. Don’t use any manipulative communication patterns. Stay away from tricking people and making users addicted. Take responsibility for your power.

Conclusion

We have so many opportunities in UX and UI Design to really cater for ecological and social sustainability. We can reduce our data heavy websites and digital products. We can care for accessibility, equality, diversity and mental health. We can go for social and environmental habit changes and positive impact.

If you’d like to learn more about ecological and social UX/UI design head over to my podcast Green the Web. You can also follow my Instagram or blog. I will cover more aspects around this topic in my upcoming episodes and blog posts.

And now? I’m keen to know what your additional thoughts are about sustainable UX Design. I’m always happy to get into discussions. Let’s grow together.