Unfortunately, I have found that many digital designers and developers ignore ordinary people living on ordinary wages. Not because designers and developers are bad people. No. It’s because most digital professionals live in a high-tech, large-screen, high-resolution, unlimited high-speed bandwidth bubble. Get some fresh air out in the real world. Get out of the bubble.
(McGovern 2020, p. 105)
Today, I want to shortly summarize the chapter Webwaste from Gerry McGoverns book, World Wide Waste1. This chapter mainly deals with the correlation between web design and sustainable user experience on the web. It covers topics like: page size, image and video use, overall content implementation as well as coding.
The Web is obese
It is worth noting that the number of websites on the internet has increased significantly over the years, from around 3,000 in 1994 to approximately 1.7 billion in 2019. Additionally, webpages have grown in size, from about 100 KB to roughly 4 MB between 2003 and 2019. It is interesting to observe that the average load time for webpages has also increased, from approximately 4.3 seconds on mobile phones in 2013 to about 10.3 seconds on computers and 27.3 seconds on mobile devices by October 2019. It is widely acknowledged that slow websites are not well-received by users. In 2018, a study conducted by Google revealed that more than half of mobile users would leave a webpage if it took longer than three seconds to load.
Third-Party Services
The implemented third-party services (cookies) mostly function like a Trojan Horse. You think you’re accessing one website or app, but then all these other third-parties start accessing you and start tracking your web activities. This does not only raise privacy concerns but also consumes more energy than necessary, because you want to enter one website but it is filled with 22 third-party services, so you ultimately enter or get entered by 23 websites or services.
Images
The use of certain images on the Web has been identified as a potential source of digital pollution. Some of these images, such as clichéd and stock images, may not add any value, interest or use to the content. They may also contribute to page bloat, which can slow down page loading times and generate unnecessary pollution. Additionally, they may occupy valuable space on the page, which could otherwise be used for more useful content, leading to unnecessary scrolling. It is worth noting that high-resolution images can have a considerable impact on the environment. As an example, moving from 4K to 8K resolution triples the file size. A 4K image, which has a size of 6.9 MB, increases to 18 MB at 8K. Furthermore, text-only solutions tend to perform better. This is exemplified by a UK government initiative to encourage people to sign up as potential organ donors, which tested eight different approaches. Interestingly, those that used images were found to be the least effective.
Videos
Every time you see a video, imagine seeing a little diesel truck belching fumes as it trundles across the web, because that’s the impact videso have on the environment. One second of video has as much impact on the environment as 50.000 words of text, which is enough text for a pretty hefty book. Scientist Rabih Bashroush calculated that the music video for “Despacito” consumed as much electricity as Chad, Guinea-Bissau, Somalia, Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic would use in a year. So please, only use video when you know it makes a real difference.
JavaScript, CSS and HTML
It has been observed that 1 KB of JavaScript causes more pollution than 1 KB of text due to the energy-intensive processes it sets in motion. In fact, processing 370 KB of JavaScript on an average smartphone used in 2019 could take up to 12 seconds, which can be particularly challenging for older, slower phones, causing them to slow down or even freeze. Minimizing JavaScript size is an important consideration for web pages, as it can often have a significant impact on loading times. CSS and HTML control the layout and presentation of content on a webpage. HTML can easily become bloated and needs to be carefully maintained and minimized. In using CSS, it has become convenient to apply frameworks. These are all-in-one packages that contain all the CSS you might need to use and much, much more. These frameworks might load about 100 KB of CSS but usually most sites don’t need any more than 10 KB of the 100 KB downloaded. So 90 % is waste.
What can you take away today?
Every image, every sentence, every line of code creates pollution because it needs energy. While not creating anything is one way to be environmentally friendly, reusing is often a better option. Sharing something that is lean and useful that you have created can also help to reduce pollution, as it means that someone else will not need to create it. Additionally, deleting something that is no longer needed can help to reduce pollution, as storing and transmitting data also contributes to pollution.
Every day decide on at least one thing you won’t do, one thing you’ll reuse, one thing you’ll share, one thing you’ll remove. It’s not that difficult to create or to add something. To remove what needs to be removed, to see what is unnecessary, what is getting in the way, that is such an unappreciated and deep skill. Not just that, to remove requires bravery.
- McGovern, Gerry (2020): World Wide Waste. How digital is killing our planet – and what we can do about it. ↩︎
