Evaluating your design on sustainability

Transitioning towards sustainable UX begins with understanding the environmental impact of your design. But how can you improve this impact? Well, there are various approaches, but one effective starting point is a simple user experience audit. Think of a UX audit as a health check for digital products. Its goal is to identify strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement in the user interface. When it comes to sustainable UX, these audits are particularly useful for finding opportunities to make your designs more eco-friendly and efficient. Now let's explore a few simple UX audit strategies. I suggest picking one of your design projects and applying the following tips. It could be your personal website and mobile application or any other product that you worked on. Begin by assessing the usability and ease of use of your product. Ask yourself, can my users find what they need quickly and with minimum effort? You can simplify your design by removing unnecessary elements and visual clutter. For example, you can aim for a cleaner layout, delete buttons that are rarely used, and simplify navigation by including less menu items. These efforts contribute to reducing energy consumption because your product needs less computer resources for rendering and processing. Another approach is to enhance task efficiency. Can your users complete their tasks with as few steps as possible? For example, if there are five steps needed to login into your application, can it be reduced to one or two steps instead? Less steps means users interact less with your product that results in lower energy consumption. So always look for opportunities to simplify processes where you can. Also, look into how much energy your product uses. This can be easily done with reviewing the number of animations, videos, heavy images, and user interface elements using your product. Try to reduce or eliminate these elements where possible to practice more sustainable design. Also, I recommend gathering user feedback through surveys or interviews. They are your best source for understanding any challenges or frustrations your users face while using your design. Let me share an example from one of my projects. Our team discovered that users couldn't find a way to save documents, something that we never thought about as a problem. But by listening to users and addressing their concerns, we could not only improve user experience but also make our product more energy-efficient. Because with a simple redesign with it, users now spend way less time saving documents compared to before. We've only scratched the surface of UX audit strategies in this lesson. However, I encourage you to start with these basics and use them in your design project. It's a great way to get started on your journey towards sustainable UX.