Product Design for Sustainability
How products we build today can make the world more sustainable tomorrow.
97% of households in the UK own an electric tea kettle and 65% of them admit to overfilling their kettles. The extra energy that is wasted on a daily basis for boiling unused water is enough to light all the streetlights in London for a night.
Impressive, right? Leyla Acaroglu claims in her TED-talk that this overconsumption on a national scale could be prevented by more thoughtful product design. Making kettles smaller and easier to understand how much water is needed for a cup of tea could prevent the UK from buying nuclear power from France during TV pickups. TV pickup is a phenomenon of millions of Brits turning on their kettles during commercial breaks, when watching big events broadcasted on TV, like the FIFA World Cup.
What is sustainability
“Sustainability is an approach to design and development that focuses on environmental, social, and financial factors that are often never addressed.” — Nathan Shedroff
Sustainability focuses on efficient and effective solutions that are better for society, the environment, and companies via effectively using natural resources, and reducing waste and toxins in the environment. It is mostly done by promoting:
- Decrease of carbon footprint
- Reuse
- Recycling
- Reducing over-consumption
- Diversity
- Decentralization and more.
What does it have to do with my iPhone app?
The digital products we build are affecting the physical environment via transportation, travel, food, printing, delivery process, shopping etc.
When building products that shape the behaviour and daily habits of millions of people, we should be more conscious about how these products affect the environment.
We’re using words like engagement, performance, accessibility, security, conversion, technical debt, privacy every day to evaluate our decisions and trade-offs. However, we rarely hear the word sustainability in product discussions.
You will see in some ideas I drafted for big-scaled companies, that besides positive social and environmental impact, sustainable products could improve users experience and sales (66% of millennials say they would pay more for your products).
How companies can design for sustainability tomorrow
Here are some ideas of how different companies should consider making their products more sustainable. Obviously, I don’t have enough data to claim that these solutions make sense from a business perspective, so the purpose of these is to show how small-effort improvements can affect the environment.
MacOS’ impact on paper waste
macOS should automatically downscale content of documents that are having a single paragraph on the last page.
You’ll need 4 pages to print this New York Times article using Safari. The last page would include just a single line with a copyright credit line.
macOS allows to scale the content down manually, but how many people would do that? It could be scaled down automatically to 98% of the original size to save a sheet of paper without requiring any action:
Chrome doesn’t even have a scale-down option. It does have a “Minimize margins” option, but Google took a product decision to hide it behind two additional clicks in the “More Settings” section.
LinkedIn should promote a remote workforce
…or at least provide an option to search for remote careers or to add a job that is remote. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find either option.
Working remotely minimizes employees carbon footprint by making everyday commute unnecessary, conserves office space, makes employees eat better, feel happier and more productive. And, of course, it saves money for the company.
I am sure LinkedIn is familiar with the idea of a remote workforce and has looked into offer HR services in the market. But it looks like a huge business opportunity that is missed out on:
- Companies like Amazon, IBM, Dell, Salesforce, Apple have thousands of remote job positions.
- Remote job postings increased by 36% in 2015 compared to 2014.
- Successful companies like Basecamp, InVision, Automattic, GitHub, Zapier, Treehouse have completely or partially distributed teams.
Update 2021: LinkedIn implemented the remote work filter:
Kayak should encourage users to buy direct flights
Direct flights are much less harmful to the environment. A sustainability factor could be used as a selling point for direct (more expensive) flights, so Kayak can get a bigger cut.
Flights are bad for the environment in general. But flights with layovers/connections are very bad since 50% of carbon emissions come from takeoff and landing.
Update 2021: Kayak (and Google Flights) implemented this solution
Medium‘s impact on paper waste
I love Medium, but while printing any article there always one or two blank pages are being left blank at the end of it. The product is all about the reading experience, so I think printing should be expected user behaviour. It seems like it wasn’t defined as such during product building and QA testing.
Food deliveries should promote less waste
Food-delivery services should be asking restaurants not to add plastic cutlery to home deliveries until the user intentionally asks for it. Do you have cutlery at home? I think it’s safe to assume that most people do.
Besides the waste, restaurants unintentionally make their food taste worse by making people eat their food with plastic cutlery.
To make a bigger commitment, food delivery services could promote vegan and organic food (livestock is a bigger polluter than cars) and allow users to filter restaurants that are committed to sustainability or even promote them in search results.
Update 2021: Uber Eats implemented opt-in for cutlery:
Google Maps should encourage people to prefer public transportation and bikes over cars
- Promote public transportation over car by showing it as the first tab in the right context. For me taking driving to the office with a car takes almost the same time as going by bus. I never drive a car and Google knows it. I don’t even have a driver licence, but Google still decides to promote private cars over other transportation options for me.
- Add bike-route option even if there is no bike lines data. Google prefer not to show bike option for cities that they don’t have enough data about bike-lanes. How about showing the same route as for cars, but with an updated time estimation for bikes? That’s exactly what people are doing if they don’t know about bike lanes anyway. By the way, even though I can’t get bike directions for going to the office, when I ask for directions from Berlin to Paris, Google Maps does suggest a bike route.
Update 2021: Google Maps incorporated sustainability considerations:
eBay should encourage users to sell their old stuff
Since eBay stores all the history of my purchases it should suggest to sell items that item is supposed to replace.
For example it’s pretty trivial that when I’m buying iPhone 7, most probably it is bought to replace the iPhone 6s that I bought last year:
A $1000-spending seems like a perfect time to be suggested to get rid of my old phone and get $400 back. In addition eBay already have all the item description so creating an auction for my old iPhone wouldn’t be a big deal.
eBay should encourage users to use ground shipping
Another and an easier way for eBay to make a positive impact on the environment is to encourage users to prefer a ground shipping over an air-shipping. CO2-impact made by airplanes is 10–20 times higher then by trucks. By doing a small educating label eBay could make a big impact making people prefer a more eco-friendly shipping method.
Amazon should collect products durability data
I wrote a separate article explaining why and how Amazon should collect data about products durability allowing consumers to do smarter purchase decisions.
Update 2019: Amazon now allows reviewing specific features of some products. One of the categories for a narrow variety of products is “Durability”:
How you can make your product more sustainable:
- First of all, it’s extremely important to understand that sustainability is much more complex than it seems to be. Measuring sustainability includes so many aspects that it’s not always easy to understand which decision is right sustainability-wise.
- Educate yourself about sustainability. It will shift your perspective and make you more aware of global issues that are usually not addressed in our daily routine. It’s good both for personal and professional reasons.
- Challenge your product by asking these questions.
- Learn more about non-harmful printing.
- Talk about sustainability issues in your daily meetings. Even when you’re discussing a feature that isn’t sustainable but in your opinion should be developed, speak out. People should be aware that the sustainability factor has a place in evaluating decisions.
- Challenge a person who is interviewed for a product-related position with a better-sustainability question.
- Think about what impact everything you design would have if 10 million people would use it. Would it be bad? How can you make it better?
More info:
- Design Is the Problem (by Nathan Shedroff, 2011)— an amazing book that has most of the information everyone who builds products should know about sustainability.
- Designing for Sustainability (by Tim Frick, 2016) — a book that came out just now, while I was writing this article. It focuses on how software architecture and code affects sustainability.
- SustainableUX 2017 (by Jen Briselli, Jenn Schlick, James Christie)— a free online conference about the impact of design on sustainability.
- Sustainability StackExchange — I was really happy to find out that there is a StackExchange dedicated to sustainability. As I mentioned, sustainability is very complex and this resource helps to understand it better.
I wrote a book
My book “Solving Product Design Exercises” helps UX designers prepare for job interviews and practice their product thinking.
With this book you’ll also learn how to interview designers, step up your design career and improve your portfolio.
