From sustainable design principles to practical W3C guidelines: Making digital sustainability happen through UX design
Contributing to the W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines, I enjoyed working with talented editors and UX professionals to shape 21 guidelines in the User Experience Design category. In this post, I spotlight selected guidelines, reflecting on how they were written, and how they encapsulate the ethos of the principles behind them.
The W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG), scheduled to reach standard status in April 2026, and recently published in Draft Note status, promise to be a milestone in an ongoing drive to make the internet more sustainable. The guidelines have been in development for several years, shaped by groups of contributors around the globe, following W3C protocols and processes to ensure they meet the appropriate standards and are also easily implementable.
Read more about the WSG and my experience contributing to shaping them in my separate blog post:
Access the Web Sustainability Guidelines on w3.org
The WSG were built on sustainability principles and are presented in four sections
As outlined in the Abstract of the WSG, the guidelines are based on three broad principles:
- People
- Planet
- Prosperity
Furthermore, they draw on the principles of the Sustainable Web Manifesto, which advocates for web services and products to be designed for sustainability by ensuring they are:
- Clean
- Efficient
- Open
- Honest
- Regenerative
- Resilient
Adopting these principles was a good starting point to begin writing the guidelines and over time, four categories of Web Sustainability Guidelines were developed:
- User Experience Design
- Web Development
- Hosting, Infrastructure and Systems
- Business Strategy and Product Management
Read the Abstract of the Web Sustainability Guidelines
Each UX Web Sustainability Guideline went through multiple rounds of critique
Having worked in and advocated for user-centred design for years I am often asked for guidance on how to ‘do UX design’, from people who appreciate the value UX can bring and want to bring it into their working practice. Many UX text books outline UX design principles and while these are helpful to steer direction, they tend to be open to interpretation and therefore are difficult to implement in specific contexts and circumstances.
When I joined the W3C UX task force for developing the User Experience Design Web Sustainability Guidelines, I recognised the same challenge, to write guidance that is specific enough to be implemented, but broad enough to be adapted to different use cases. Through multiple rounds of drafting, editing and discussion, sharing and learning from each others’ experiences and viewpoints and accompanied by some excellent editorial and authoring work, we progressed 29 UX Web Sustainability Guidelines to 21 guidelines at Draft Note status, satisfied that each guideline had gone through a sufficiently rigorous critique process.
UX WSG summary: Key guidelines aimed at effecting changed mindsets and practices
With the UX WSG now at a milestone Draft Note stage, I found it useful to sense-check the guidelines against the principles, to reaffirm the contribution each guideline would make to greener web products and services, to recognise ways the individual guidelines complemented each other and to start thinking about ways to apply the guidelines.
Guidelines 2.1 and 2.3 are about considering impact on the planet
UX practice advocates considering user needs and putting these front-and-centre in the design process. Sustainable digital design also places an emphasis on designing for users, but additionally takes into account the wider ecosystem that users exist in, aiming to bring social equity benefits as well as environmental ones. By drawing attention to ‘external factors’, ‘planetary needs’ and impacts on ‘non-user, non-human (animal, planet) personas’, guidelines 2.1. and 2.3. encourage applying a planet-focused mindset from the outset. Resources supplied with each guideline relating to consequence-scanning and stakeholder mapping techniques are aimed at supporting people taking practical steps to think through and document potential impacts of their web service or product.
2.1: Examine and disclose any external factors interacting with your project
2.3: Integrate sustainability into every stage of the ideation process
Stakeholder Mapping guide from Mightybytes, listed as a resource with guideline 2.3
Guidelines 2.4 and 2.5 encourage clean, efficient design focused on user needs
Good user-centred design results in interfaces that support people to complete tasks effectively and efficiently. Often, this aligns with minimal use of components and design elements, to enable users to focus on the task in hand for a smooth, seamless user experience. A cluster of the WSG contain advice and helpful resources aligned with the ‘Clean’ and ‘Efficient’ sustainability principles, which also speak to achieving good UX. Starting at a high level, guideline 2.6 states ‘Minimize non-essential content, interactivity or journeys’, with success criteria including ‘Efficient paths’ and ‘Patterns for efficiency’, and resources including pattern libraries to refer to.
Building on this concept, guideline 2.5: ‘Ensure navigation and wayfinding are well-structured’ prioritises good navigation and search to support users to find what they need and offers resources that help with website navigation design.
2.4: Minimize non-essential content, interactivity or journeys
2.5: Ensure navigation and wayfinding are well-structured
Menus tutorial from the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, listed as a resource with guideline 2.5
Open and honest principles manifest in guidelines 2.6 and 2.7
Designing for efficiency with a minimalist approach aligns with measures to reduce distractive design elements and content. Guideline 2.9 ‘Design to assist and not to distract’ specifically calls for respecting users’ attention, minimising distractions and avoiding engagement traps. Guideline 2.7 ‘Avoid being manipulative or deceptive’ calls out unethical practices like use of deceptive design patterns and manipulating search results, and advocates for honesty and openness through measures like: correcting inaccuracies and asking for user consent to gather tracking and analytics data.
2.6: Design to assist and not to distract
2.7: Avoid being manipulative or deceptive
Deceptive Patterns, included as a resource with guideline 2.7
Guidelines 2.11 and 2.17 call for optimisation to support efficiency and regeneration
Recognising the impact of specific types of content on digital sustainability, several guidelines contain recommendations for specific optimisation practices to help reduce energy consumption in data transfer, place less demand on network infrastructure and storage and also improve device efficiency. Guideline 2.11: ‘Optimize media for sustainability’, focuses on media, recommending that actions like compression, deferred loading, progressive enhancement and user-controlled activation be taken to minimise the energy consumption associated with media loading and display. Guideline 2.17: ‘Reduce the impact of downloadable and physical documents’ focuses on documents, offering ways to minimise the environmental impact of document downloads by compression, plus alternatives to downloading like: viewing in browsers and saving documents server-side.
As well as supporting the efficiency principle, these optimisation-focused guidelines have the added benefit of enabling regeneration, since if devices can be made to work more efficiently, they are likely to last longer, alleviating the need to use precious resources to make more, and the need to expend resources for responsible disposal of e-waste.
2.11: Optimize media for sustainability
2.17: Reduce the impact of downloadable and physical documents
Resilience is a principle inherent in guidelines 2.18 – 2.21
For web services and products to be sustainable, they need to incorporate a degree of resilience and adaptability, to ensure they continue to work in changeable conditions (for example: power outages, cyberattacks, technology upgrades and resource and data limitations), avoiding the need for rebuilds and the digital waste this process generates. Remaining resilient can be viewed as a kind of continuous improvement, whereby digital artefacts continue to get better to meet the needs and the contexts of those using them. As per the Lean UX method, this is traditionally achieved by repeated cycles of measurement and testing with users, which forms the ethos of the following guidelines:
2.18: Involve users and contributors early in the project
2.19: Audit and test for bugs or issues requiring resolution
2.21: Regularly test and maintain compatibility
As with the other WSG, each of these guidelines includes multiple resources to help people continually test and audit web services and products with users to ensure they remain useful and usable, avoiding the risk of them becoming obsolete.
Applying these guidelines to UX design at the University will help test them out
Now the guidelines are at Draft Note stage, and they will progress through several more W3C-defined stages before they are submitted as standards in April 2026. From now until then, I am looking forward to engaging with them further in the context of forthcoming web-related work of the UX Service, as a way to ensure we get on the front-foot and apply digital sustainability thinking to the work we do along with other well-established and beneficial concepts like user-centred design, security and accessibility. Furthermore, I am keen to look for opportunities to embed these guidelines into a broader strategic approach to incorporating digital sustainability principles into user-centred design work.
Read more about our work on bringing UX and digital sustainability together in these blog posts documenting our recent case studies:
