As the UX Service begins our next digital sustainability initiative, it was timely to pull together insights from our recent work for ideas on ways to reduce the environmental impact of digital content.

To support the University’s pledge to become net carbon zero by 2040, in 2024 the Website and Communications team supported three interns to work on digital sustainability, aligned with the Building on this work, we’ve recently begun our 2025 Green Digital Design internship, with a focus on continuing to apply user-centred design principles to minimise the environmental footprint of the University’s digital content, without compromising on user experience.

The pioneering internships taught us much about different approaches to measuring digital sustainability and highlighted various techniques for reducing the energy emissions and carbon cost of webpages, which we were able to put into practice to considerably reduce the digital footprint of the UX Service website.

Read more about the University’s sustainability goals

Read about the 2024 digital sustainability internships in a collection of blog posts

Re-thinking digital content as removable not permanent

Since the 2024 internships, we have adopted digital sustainability thinking and applied it to various aspects of our work in the UX Service to help us evolve the way we design digital content. Keeping in mind the ideal user experience: right content, delivered at the right time, in a way users expect, instead of regarding digital content as something permanent, to be published and forgotten, we have transitioned to encouraging planning for transiency in digital content, recognising the need for content to be adapted to support changing user needs (over the course of time, or throughout different stages in user journeys), and also considering the need to keep question whether content is necessary, and to remove content once it is surplus to user requirements.

Always be on the lookout for waste images, waste code, waste content. Get into the habit of removing something every time you add something – Gerry McGovern, from his book ‘World Wide Waste – How digital is killing our planet and what we can do about it’

Appreciating that keeping content fresh through continued maintenance takes work and time, we have encouraged decisions about content publication based on assessment of user needs as well as capacity and resource to keep content updated. In some cases, this has resulted in publishers opting to reduce content to make maintenance more manageable, in others, publishers have questioned whether certain pieces of content need to be published at all. Several ideas for lessening the environmental impact of digital content through improved content management practices were sparked by several aspects of our recent work on individual projects and case studies, documented below.

Ideas for more efficient use of content from our staff profiles project

The Role of Profiles project investigated the usage of web-based staff profiles to look for ways to improve this online provision to meet the needs and requirements of University staff. In the course of this research, many profiles were found to contain minimal content and many more were found to be out-of-date. Hearing from staff about their profiles through individual interviews led to several ideas emerging for reducing the environmental impact of staff profile content.

Refrain from publishing profiles by default: opt in rather than opt out

Investigating why a large proportion of staff profile content was outdated required understanding of the staff profile content lifecycle: the processes by which profiles are created, maintained and deleted. Analysing this lifecycle revealed a tendency in some areas of the University to create staff profiles by default, (for example, as part of an induction process). In some cases, this meant that staff didn’t realise they had a profile and therefore hadn’t updated it and didn’t use it, causing it to become wasted digital content. A more environmentally-conscious approach was to only create University website profiles for staff who wanted to use them to share details about themselves and their work, bearing in mind that in many cases, staff used multiple platforms to publish profile content (for example, research group sites, personal websites, LinkedIn, research repositories) depending on the audiences they wanted to reach.

Read more in this blog post:

Keeping profiles up-to-date: Practices and processes for managing the end-to-end lifecycle of staff profiles

Consider if a single team profile is more useful than multiple individual profiles

Interviews with professional service staff members revealed that many included minimal detail in their profiles. Further analysis revealed that in many cases, the preferred route for contacting professional services staff was at the team level, for example, through a generic enquiries email or form), rather than reaching out to individual staff members. In some cases it was beneficial to replace collections of individual profiles with a clearer call-to-action to contact the team, therefore reducing complexity for the website visitor as well as lessening the environmental impact of multiple profiles that were surplus to requirements.

Selective content publication approaches adopted by the Careers Service

Since the start of the year, the UX team have been supporting the Careers Service to make their website more user-centred, and we were keen to help them apply digital sustainability thinking to the way they manage content on their website.

Weeding out non-visited and duplicated content

A workshop in January 2025 had helped tease out the Careers Service website priorities, in terms of what the service users required and what the Careers Service needed them to know. These data, together with data from Google Analytics showing the top-visited pages as well as pages that were not visited, were used by the Careers Service team to identify pages for removal from the existing site. In addition, an audit of the site content identified many instances of duplicated content (for example where the same guidance had been included in separate sections due to the site structure being comprised of sections aimed at different audiences). Many of these duplicated pages were also tagged for removal to considerably reduce the digital footprint of the site.

Read more about the workshop in Nick Daniels’ blog post:

Working with the Careers Service on their content strategy

Identifying content needed to support different stages of career readiness

To help the Careers Service make further decisions about their web content, we ran two activities to help the team focus on their service users. A user-journey mapping session focused on identifying how PhD students interacted with the Careers Service helped pinpoint which web content was needed to support this process, and when content was not needed (because user needs were better met with in-person interactions, such as events or appointments). A sketching workshop with students revealed expectations for content on a Careers Service homepage and a follow-up activity identified content required to support students at different stages of career readiness (from initial information-seeking activities through to planning for interviews and deciding between job offers). These combined activities further helped identify critical content as well as content that Careers Service website visitors did not use. For example, Careers Service webpages containing information about different career industries was difficult to keep up-to-date and was found to be infrequently used, with users opting to find this information directly from specialist organisations, companies and and other bodies related to the industry of interest. A better approach was for the Careers Service website to signpost users to these sources, rather than attempt to provide this content.

Endineering – the idea of designing experiences with the end in mind

In his book ‘Endineering: Designing consumption lifecycles that end as well as they begin’ author Joe Macleod highlights the damaging societal tendency to place enhanced focus on starting experiences (for example, buying new products, entering into contracts, beginning relationships in the context of service delivery) without paying due attention to how the experiences will end.

Joe gives many thought-provoking examples in the physical world, but I felt the idea could equally be applied in the realm of digital content at the University. For example, when a web page about an event is created, this tends to prioritise the experiences of those attending and contributing to the event up to the point of the event happening. It is less common for attention to be paid to adapting content to support aspects of the post-event experience such as accessing event resources, finding out about similar events, keeping in contact with other attendees. The tendency to focus on beginnings not only results in missed opportunities but also leads to surplus content which runs the risk of providing poor or misleading experiences (for example, if people access the page once the event has passed and are unable to take part).

To design a good experience ending, the book recommends firstly paying attention to how the relationship between provider and consumer could come to an end (for example, when a task or event is completed as planned or when it finishes unexpectedly early). With predicted endings mapped out, consideration should be made of the associated stages and indicators – including recognition that the relationship has come to an end, actions to effect the ending, confirmation that the ending has occurred and looking to the future beyond the ending. Thoughtful consideration of endings when it comes to digital content encourages the notion that web content is not permanent and therefore is a useful construct to encourage more digitally sustainable approaches to content management.

Emerging standards, guidelines and ideas for designing digital content sustainably

Since 2024, new approaches and ideas for achieving digital sustainability have come thick and fast as more and more people, organisations and official bodies recognise the benefits of an sustainability conscious approach to digital content publication and begin to take action by developing initiatives and formulating standards. These include:

• The Sustainable UX Network resources
• Gov.uk’s approach to sustainable design
• Web Sustainability Guidelines
• Green Software Foundation guidance

In this year’s internship, we are looking forward to learning more about these and applying them to the cause of improving the University’s digital impact to continue to contribute towards the achievement of the institution’s wider environmentally-focused goals.