Last year, our Green Digital Design Intern audited the Edinburgh Innovations website for digital sustainability, and made several recommendations. This year’s internship went further – researching how users actually interacted with the site and uncovering potential to improve both the site’s UX and its environmental impact.

In 2024 the UX Service and the wider Website and Communications team begun a digital sustainability initiative with a dual purpose:

• Learning about the environmental impact of websites and other digital artefacts
• Taking steps to reduce this impact, in line with the University’s pledge to become net zero by 2040 and objectives laid out in the University Digital Strategy

After an initial focus on understanding contributory factors, potential measurements and associated tools relating to digital sustainability, the UX Service began thinking about practically applying what we had learned in the context of website design. In particular, we were keen to learn:

Do low-carbon/energy efficient versions of webpages/websites still engage audiences, or do they offer a poorer user experience?

With this research question in mind, we engaged University staff with website publishing responsibilities and started working on several case studies:

• Our own UX Service website
• Careers Service website
• Edinburgh Innovations website

Our work on the UX Service website and Careers Service website is detailed in related blog posts:

• How green can we make the UX Service website? Using digital sustainability data to drive user-centred design decisions
• User-centred, planet focused: How UX and digital sustainability drove a 20% cut in the digital footprint of the Careers Service website

This blog post summarises two phases of our work with Edinburgh Innovations on digital sustainability. More specifically, it documents the work of two student staff who joined the UX Service for summer internships: Chris O’Neil, Green Digital Design Intern 2024 and Zbigniew Kanabrodski, Green Digital Design Intern 2025.

Phase 1: A digital sustainability audit showed images, PDFs, videos and scripts made pages heavy

Several tools exist which offer digital sustainability measurements of webpages and websites. Investigations and analysis showed that it is difficult to obtain accurate, reliable measurements of this nature, however, for the purposes of our work it was important to start somewhere and obtain some baseline measures to consider. From an appraisal of the available tools which can measure environmental impact of webpages, the Ecograder tool was selected to analyse the footprint of both the Edinburgh Innovations external-facing and staff-facing websites.

Ecograder works by analysing a given URL and producing a suite of 18 measurements. To maintain a consistent approach across all of the case study websites, we decided to focus on two measurements, namely:

• Carbon dioxide emissions per pageload (measured in grams)
• Total page weight (measured in KB)

Ecograder is freely available online.

Using Ecograder to measure a sample of pages from the two Edinburgh Innovations websites showed:

• The homepage of the Edinburgh Innovations website for external audiences had a slightly higher carbon dioxide emission level and page weight than the homepage of the Edinburgh Innovations site for staff
• The carbon dioxide emission level and page weights of both Edinburgh Innovations site homepages measured below the average of other University website homepages (published on the central platform, EdWeb)
• Of the 10 most-visited pages of the Edinburgh Innovations website for staff, the pages with the largest environmental impact were those containing images, videos and scripts (used to deliver dynamic content)

Some of the heavy pages from Edinburgh Innovations website for staff included:

The homepage with several images and videos

A training and events page with several images

A page on transnational funding containing links to funding sources.

Phase 1 recommendations included optimising media, streamlining user journeys and reviewing content

In response to the findings, several suggestions were made to reduce the environmental impact of the pages analysed. Some of these recommendations encouraged adoption of minimisation practices like compression, lazy loading and file formatting, whereas others prompted careful consideration of whether the page content was necessary for the desired user experience, particularly the heavier aspects of the pages like videos, images and interactive elements.

Phase 2: UX research sought to guide decisions around page content

Returning to the main research question about the trade-off between the user experience provided by lower carbon/energy efficient websites, it was important to understand more about the UX offered by the Edinburgh Innovations webpages, and the underlying purpose of these pages before making purely environmentally-focused content changes. In particular, we wanted to learn how users interacted with the pages the digital sustainability audit had shown to be heavy, and the types of audience actions Edinburgh Innovations were seeking to achieve with these pages.

A consultation with the Edinburgh Innovations team revealed their priority pages and associated goals

Choosing to focus on the Edinburgh Innovations website aimed at staff, Zbigniew Kanabrodski held interviews with Ben Gracey (Digital Marketing Manager) and others from the Edinburgh Innovations team which helped to establish the overarching goals of this site – including the pages and sections they wanted their audiences to engage with, and the actions they wanted to see these audiences take after they had interacted with the site. A key aim of Edinburgh Innovations is to help University staff maximise the impact of their research, which they achieve by offering events, training programmes, career pathways and courses. They encourage staff to sign up to a newsletter and also seek to put academic research staff in contact with specialist Business Development Executives who can offer tailored guidance in particular topic areas. In addition, the Edinburgh Innovations site is used to showcase success stories in the form of video interviews which are intended for research staff to watch and become inspired to achieve similar accolades.

We designed a user research study to learn how people used the site content

The team behind the Edinburgh Innovations website were keen to understand whether people interacting with their site were able to use it for the intended purposes, so working together, we came up with a scenario and a series of tasks which formed the basis of a usability test.

The scenario asked participants to assume they were an early career researcher affiliated with the College of Science and Engineering and had come to the Edinburgh Innovations website looking to find out what help was available to them. The tasks were as follows:

1. Finding where to sign up for a training course

[Starting on the homepage]: You have heard there are training courses available to help you learn techniques to demonstrate the impact of your research. Where would you go to find these?

2. Appraisal and analysis of content (including videos) on the Engage page

[Starting on the Engage page]: Imagine you have been sent a link to this page – please can you have a look at the content that is here and when you have finished doing that please let me know what you think this page is for? –

[Picking an image from the Engage page]: Please watch this video, and after you have finished watching it, please tell me of extra information you gained from the video, and please tell me what would be the next step you would take?

3. Finding the relevant staff member from the contact page

[Starting on the Engage page]: Bearing in mind your association with the College of Science and Engineering you want to find out who would be the best person to contact from the Edinburgh Innovations team to help you. How would you proceed?

4. Assessing how video content is consumed and used

[Starting on the Be Inspired page]: You’ve arrived at this page and are interested to look for examples of work from other researchers from the College of Science and Engineering. How would you do this?

5. Finding the Innovation Career Pathway information

[Following on from the previous task]: You have heard there are some resources you can use for personal development available through

6. Signing up for the Edinburgh Innovations newsletter

[Following on from the previous task]: You want to hear more from Edinburgh Innovations in the future – how would you achieve this?

Five participants were recruited to take part in the tests, carried out by Zbigniew Kanabrodksi. In some tests the participants used their mobile devices and in others, they used laptops.

As part of the UX research, we learned a bit about video consumption habits

Some of the tasks sought to understand how users interacted with the video content available within the Edinburgh Innovations site. We were also interested to take the opportunity to learn about how people interacted with video content, so before the tests began, we asked participants to talk about the last time they had watched a video for learning or work purposes. Use cases varied from watching an instructional video on YouTube on a desktop device, while pausing to take notes, watching recorded lectures with subtitles on, and watching hobby-focused videos on Tiktok. Additional desk-based research by Zbigniew Kanabrodski referring to sector-based trend reports revealed:

• Average watch times of videos on LinkedIn are 22 seconds, versus 20 seconds on Instagram and 5.3 seconds on TikTok
• Videos under 30 seconds are 200% more likely to be watched all the way through than those over 30 seconds (from LinkedIn internal research from 2018)
• 57% of LinkedIn video views come from mobile devices.

Do LinkedIn videos work better than blogs? Here’s the data (Article published on Martech website, from June 2025)

Why LinkedIn is spotlighting the average watch time metric to support its video push (Article published on Digiday.com website,  from February 2025)

60+ social media video statistics marketers need to know in 2025 (Article published on Sproutsocial website, from February, 2025)

Short-form vs. long-form video length best practices for social media (Article published on Sproutsocial website, from December 2020)

We found out that the site content supported some goals but not others

Four of the six tasks required participants to find specific pieces of information, which they were able to do with varying degrees of success. All participants were able to find where to sign up to receive the Edinburgh Innovations newsletter. For the other tasks, participants were hindered from finding the desired destination due to other options available. For example, in the search for a defined training course, they found many other relevant events which they felt could be classed as training, and in the search for the right staff member (Business Development Executive) they were waylaid by uncovering various other ways to contact Edinburgh Innovations staff.

Participants were unfamiliar with some of the acronyms on the Edinburgh Innovations site pages

In order to address the tasks, participants needed to scan the textual content on the Edinburgh Innovations site pages. When they did so, several acronyms stood out to them, and they were unclear what these meant. They included:

• EI (short for Edinburgh Innovations) included on the Contact us page
• ECR (short for Early Career Researcher) on the Be Inspired page
• EPSRC (short for Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) on the pages with content for personal development.

Video content wasn’t engaging participants in the ways it was intended

Two of the tasks set out to discover how participants naturally interacted with video content presented on webpages. One task sought to understand the impact that watching short video about a training programme had on participants once they had read the surrounding content on the page. Participants reported that they were able to understand what the programme was about from the page content, and that the video did not provide them with anything new in that regard, suggesting that the video may be better placed on a social media channel as a teaser for the full information about the programme that was available on the page.

Another task sought to discover how participants decided whether to watch videos or not, by asking them how they would go about finding information on a given topic (with video content being one of the sources of information about the topic). Although a webpage contained videos about how staff from the College of Science and Engineering had worked with Edinburgh Innovations to promote the impact of their research, when asked about how they would learn about this work, participants looked for textual content to scan (for example content published elsewhere on the page, descriptions of the videos or transcripts of the video content) rather than choosing to watch the videos themselves.

Participants spent less time interacting with the content on a mobile compared to a desktop

Observing participants using the Edinburgh Innovations website on a phone versus a desktop showed that, on the whole, when they used a mobile, participants were more inclined to scroll quickly, scanning to get to call-to-action buttons or other stand-out page components, rather than to spend time reading textual page content.

Watching this behaviour prompted thinking about the ideal volume and balance of information presented on the Edinburgh Innovations site pages – and more specifically to consider whether every piece of content earned its place in terms of being useful and usable and worthy of user attention on the limited real-estate of each page of the site.

Phase 2 recommendations included content fixes and a Phase 3 to include more research with representative audiences

From the Phase 2 research findings, there were some recommendations to change content (for example, spelling out acronyms and including transcripts of videos), however, taking a wider view, and also taking into account what we had learned in Phase 1 of the work, we agreed a course of action to begin a Phase 3 of work.

In this phase, continuing the internship with newly appointed Green Digital Design Intern Dono Abdurahmanova, we intend to continue to carry out further research both with the Edinburgh Innovations team and with representative users of their staff-facing site towards the goal of optimising the content presented for both the goals of the site owners and its audiences in environmentally conscious ways.

Continuing to work together, we wish to pay particular attention to consider how we can achieve the best balance of content, and how we can make best and most sustainable use of the video content produced by Edinburgh Innovations, to engage audiences while minimising the site’s environmental impact.