Design a green UX.

Welcome to ACAD!

I read about Green UX for the first time here. And you’re right in making the connection from ‘Green’ to ‘environment-friendly’, because that is exactly what it is.

Let’s say a person is spending time clicking around on Amazon trying to buy the perfect pair of sneakers.

The environmental impact of this browsing session is related to the time the person spends on each page times the resources needed per page.

What are these resources we are talking about?

Assume the user is browsing on a mobile device. In that case, the user may be consuming his/her Wi-Fi or mobile network. In both cases, it attributes to a cost for the user. That’s the first resource being consumed - money.

If we go a layer deeper into the technology, we talk about the electricity consumption of the mobile device. That’s the second resource - electricity.

Let’s continue. How is a web page loaded? Well, the mobile device requests said page from the Amazon servers. The Amazon server does some work and then returns the page to the browser. That’s the third resource - work done on the Amazon servers.

It is easy to see that the server decides the usage of the first two resources. Hence, it is the prerogative of the app creator - i.e Amazon in this case - to create a ‘Green’ UX, an experience that lets a user do their job whilst consuming the least number of resources.

Green UX is part of the approach of Sustainable web design.