Sustainability; The ability of a system to sustain itself
Opening the evenings proceedings, Claire explained that sustainability encompasses more than just the environment. For a system to sustain itself, it’s important for people and planet to strive to generate long-term prosperity, and that environment, social and governance should work together in balance.
You can read about the pillars in greater detail, by checking out our Towards a Sustainable Business Blueprint.
Contrary to much of the prevailing thinking within tech, accessibility is only one consideration we need to make in creating inclusive products and services. A truly inclusive approach should also account for factors such as digital literacy, neurodiversity, age, gender, ethnicity, language and economic status, amongst a whole host of other factors.
Having undertaken a massive research project into industry best practice, innovative ways of working and the concepts underlying inclusive design, the team has established four principles for creating truly inclusive products and services:
Self-reflect on our methods, learn, and improve approaches to inclusive design.
With the internet being one of the biggest polluters, it’s vitally important that we use the power of good design to mitigate this impact. The newly released Web Sustainability Guidelines are a great start, but quite overwhelming in volume and detail. We need a set of broad principles we can all agree on, to help in decision-making.
The Sustainable Web Manifesto provides six clear, concise principles:
Furthermore, exploring the detailed guidelines on sustainability and accessibility, we realised that the traditional definition of a Minimum Viable Product needed updating. Satisfying the triple requirements of desirability, viability, and feasibility is not enough to ensure a product or service is sustainable and inclusive. Inspired by our principles, we refined our sense of what desirability, feasibility and viability could mean if we were further constrained by our sustainable and inclusive values.
Desirability
Feasibility
Viability
With these definitions, the possibility space of what constitutes a good product or service narrows: it must not only be good for the business, operationally and technologically achievable, and attractive to users, but must also respect longer term goals, enable thriving of future humans, and minimise negative externalities.
So, with the principles agreed, our next question was how we put them into practice.
Launched in October 2023, the editor’s draft of the Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSGs) are a set of detailed guidelines geared towards digital product design, development, hosting & infrastructure, and business & governance. As our main purpose was to understand how we as designers could make an impact with our work, we decided to map the WSG onto the MVP to clearly identify which of the WSGs we had to consider for our design work.
Another interesting take-away is that the WSG’s are an improvement on WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) when it comes to inclusivity and protecting the most vulnerable. Originally, we thought we'd be creating cheat sheets for each discipline (Interaction, content etc.) but we realised it isn’t the responsibility of a single team member to ensure a specific guideline is met. As we work in multi-disciplinary teams, we're all responsible for ensuring that a product is sustainable (ethical, accessible, and designed for inclusivity).
Because sustainable design could be a daunting task for anyone without prior knowledge of the WSGs, our priority was creating a simple to use structure that reduced the cognitive load of the full set of WSG. The only way to do this was to only show designers the WSGs relevant to them - this would depend on the stage of the project and the team’s commitment to sustainability.
The main consideration when using the framework is to ensure everyone in the team – client, design team, development team – are on the same page when it comes to the level of sustainability commitment. It’s important, though, to keep in mind that it’s unlikely we’ll be using all the WSGs on a sole product. It's more likely that we'll be making compromises depending on client’s wants and needs.
Finally, even if the team is not focusing on sustainability as a goal, we can always apply some of the WSGs to our work, and these don’t require agreement as they are in themselves good practises. A few examples include: you can always write with purpose and ensure the user journeys are simple, we can always optimise images, media and fonts, we can ensure our notifications are useful and improve the user journey.
Jennifer shared a case study of the work done for Department of Education (DfE) on their Register service email cleanup and explained that something as small as removing bounced email addresses from a database could go a long way in cutting down on carbon emissions.
To wrap up the meetup, Franco shared a case study on simplifying the digital dashboard for Border Force, with accessibility and inclusion in mind. Choosing a mobile-first design allows for improved usability, but also lower environmental impacts because it means less energy due to quicker task completion, improved carbon footprint from smaller devices emitting less carbon and reduced hardware wastage because of the extended lifespan of the devices. Alongside environmental benefits, you also fix multiple accessibility issue, address user needs and present content in its simplest form, thereby reducing cognitive overload in staff and helping them complete tasks with greater accuracy.
Applying mobile-first design with inclusion and accessibility as a priority supports economic sustainability as there will be less risk of having to invest large sums of time, money and effort in redesigning large parts of the interface for if WCAG accessibility criteria changes overtime.
Going forward, the team aims to remove obsolete data, assets and pages to help reduce carbon emitted and page load speed.
If you’re interested in learning more about how our Reasearch & Service Design team applies sustainable, accessible and inclusive design principles to our work, drop us a note at transformation@TransformUK.com and one of our experts will be in touch to chat.
