Why sustainable web design goes hand in hand with a good user experience
Benno Purin
Director Clients & Operations, Co-Founder @ Digit-One
Measured against countries, the internet as a whole is the fourth-largest emitter of CO2 (Freitag et al, 2021). A substantial share of that comes down to inefficient designs and lines of code. Alongside considerable environmental impact, a website's user experience suffers at the same time. Below we show how websites can be designed, built and developed to be efficient, user-friendly and environmentally friendly all at once. To close, we discuss a further standard for low-emission websites that has no impact on the user experience.
Green web design and user experience
As a general rule, sustainable websites focus on the essentials, are designed efficiently and are hosted green.
1. Page size and its relationship to load time
As the use of digital media on websites has grown exponentially, data volumes have risen in step. Bigger pages also mean longer load times, which in turn reduces the user experience and means higher CO2 emissions. One lever for reducing page size is to reflect critically on which media elements actually serve the user experience and which are surplus to requirements. Those elements can also be scaled efficiently and integrated into the page well.
Such elements can be images, videos, audio files, illustrations, animations, colours and typography. When implementing them, it's central that size, quality/resolution and file format meet the most efficient web standard. With colours, take care not to use them wastefully. With typography, the principle is that less is more.
2. Minimalism
On the theme of "less is more", the trend towards minimalist design is worth mentioning. Unnecessary elements are eliminated from every angle. The focus is on the bare essentials that serve a good user experience. The keyword here is efficient design. The principle of "less is more" applies to every aspect of a website: information architecture, design, colours, media, size, page load time, code.
3. Responsive design
Alongside its high usability, responsive design counts as an irreplaceable standard when it comes to environmental friendliness too. Its advantage over outdated, static websites is that responsively designed sites save resources and time while significantly improving the user experience.
4. Accessibility
Accessibility is now indispensable in everyday life and includes large groups of people who would otherwise be excluded both offline and online. Alongside that central fact, accessible web design minimises energy consumption while improving the user experience.
Here you can find out more about accessibility and UX.
5. Efficient code
When building the website you can fall back on clean, efficient code — which makes sense in every case and improves the user experience.
Further options for reducing CO2 emissions
Alongside these central facts, where CO2 reduction and user experience go hand in hand, there are further ways to reduce a website's CO2 emissions that are either neutral or detrimental in their effect on the user experience.
1. Green hosting with clean energy
Green hosting uses energy exclusively from renewable sources. That strongly minimises the website's CO2 emissions, and this measure has no impact on the user experience.
2. Images and videos in greyscale
Converting colour photos and videos to greyscale minimises file size. That increases page load speed thanks to the smaller page size. In terms of user experience, this method has a detrimental effect. Psychologically, colours are essential for putting users into a particular frame of mind. Good alternatives in terms of data size for images and videos are minimalist illustrations.
3. The colour blue
Blue is the most energy-intensive colour to display on screen. As an alternative, other colours can be used sparingly.
Conclusion
To close, it's worth noting that sustainable web design has nothing to do with going without. Important factors such as green hosting have no impact whatsoever on the user experience, yet reduce CO2 output significantly. Further principles of good web design and development conserve resources and improve the user experience. If the brand, company or person behind a website identifies with the theme of sustainability, then further CO2 reduction measures that do have a negative effect on the user experience are worth considering. Communicated well, that can create added value for the audience.