What is Sustainable UX?
Designing digital experiences to use less energy, create less carbon, be more inclusive and fair, and encourage planet-friendlier user behaviours
Design online experiences for people and planet
Sustainable UX is about designing digital products that tread lightly on the planet while creating fairer, more inclusive experiences for people. It extends human-centred design to include communities, ecosystems, and the wider impacts of our work—across the full lifecycle of research, design, development, and beyond launch.
Low-Carbon
Better performance and reduced energy use create smoother experiences for users.
Inclusive
Design that works for all abilities, cultures, and contexts strengthens communities.
Fair
Designing for equitable access for all social and economic experiences.
Ethical
Aligning with human health and ecological needs ensures that design also supports the planet.
Why Sustainable UX?
Too often, profit-driven priorities create experiences that are heavy by default, exclude anyone outside the “target” audience, use nudging in manipulative ways, collect and misuse personal data, fuel over-consumption, and treat delivery as “done” instead of an ongoing responsibility. Analytics typically measure only user and business metrics, ignoring planetary impact, while design files and workflows have become unnecessarily bloated.
These patterns waste energy, erode trust, and deepen inequality.
A single 5MB video played 10,000 times can produce as much CO₂ as driving a small petrol car ~90–100km
“Shaving off a single kilobyte in a file that is being loaded on 2 million websites reduces CO2 emissions by an estimated 2950 kg per month.”
CO2 Emissions On The Web
“A typical digital ad campaign can produce as much as 323 tons of CO2e.”
Business Insider
Sustainable UX Examples
Reducing Carbon
A website using only graphics, and no or minimal photographic images, use less energy
Nudging Behaviours
Amazon provide clickable sustainability badges that reveal helpful sustainability information.
Raising Awareness
Citizen Wolf website incorporate ‘Planet’ as a category next to the main Men and Women categories.
Bringing more life into UX
Sustainable UX builds on human-centred design to include the needs of more-than-human life.
The practices you already know remain essential, but now they sit alongside strategies that consider the needs of more-than-human life.
By expanding your default UX toolkit, you create design that is not only human-friendly, but life-friendly—connecting your work with the planet, with purpose, and with something much bigger than screens.
Low-Carbon UX
Reducing energy demand reduces carbon emissions for the planet.
Life-centred Journey Maps
Map not just user touch points, but also impacts on communities, ecosystems, and the environment.
Non-human Personas
Give voice to rivers, forests, species, or future generations impacted by your project.
Planet-focused JTBD
Incorporate planetary needs into the Jobs To Be Done framework.
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