We gave three interns three months to investigate, measure and identify strategies to reduce carbon emissions of the University’s web estate. Here are my reflections as the manager of the Green Digital Design internship

We recruited three Green internships to investigate sustainable design solutions

Early in 2024, I started planning a summer internship within the UX team. The internship would inform the Website and Communications team about sustainable web design practices, while also providing the opportunity for a student to gain design experience on a project with real impact for the University.

Our Head of Website and Communications, Stratos, was also planning a similar internship, with the focus of investigating the environmental impact of the University of Edinburgh’s web estate. We joined forces and recruited three student interns over the summer:

• Chris O’Neill, as our Green Digital Design intern.
• Catalina Rincon and Osh Doherty, as our Green Web Estate interns.

You can read more about the background of these internships in my previous blog post:

Introducing the Green Digital Design internship

While the two internships had different goals, Chris, Catalina and Osh worked closely together between June and August, to share ideas and responsibilities.

Our interns worked with University colleagues to identify the challenges of managing websites

Within the first week, the interns had already researched how we could measure the environmental impact of University websites and pages. They also spoke to a range of colleagues involved with building, maintaining and auditing websites at the University of Edinburgh.

As Green Digital Design intern, Chris spoke to the lead publishers of three websites that are hosted on EdWeb. These publishers were selected because they had already expressed interest in making their websites more sustainable.

Before Chris could make any sustainability recommendations, he needed to understand:

• What the publishers already knew about sustainable web design.
• The aims and requirements of their respective websites.
• What users needed to do on the website.
• Who was involved with editing and creating content.

This information was needed so that we could investigate sustainable design solutions that met the websites’ business and user requirements.

Measuring carbon emissions of websites is complicated

We also needed some data to understand how sustainable these websites were in the first place.

Catalina and Osh researched a range of tools that are available to measure the carbon impact of web pages. The three main tools identified were:

• Ecograder
• Website Carbon Calculator
• Beacon

These tools take in a webpage URL and estimate an amount of carbon emissions based on a single website view. However, there were some limitations of the tools. For instance:

• They all calculate carbon emissions differently, so will produce three different outputs for the same page.
• They can only measure one page at a time – our University web estate has over one million webpages, so we couldn’t possibly measure all of them!
• The calculation is based on a single page view and doesn’t consider repeated views or cacheing.

To address some of these limitations, I gave Chris, Catalina and Osh a crash course in Google Analytics 4. This information showed which pages in the University web estate tended to receive the greatest number of page views, which indicated where sustainable design changes could have the greatest impact.

This meant Chris could:

• Focus on a smaller set of frequently viewed webpages.
• Measure the carbon impact of these pages as a baseline.
• Investigate design changes to reduce this impact.

The heavier the page weight, the higher the carbon emissions

The single theme that emerged from measuring webpages was that the greater the size of the webpage, the greater the carbon emissions. From his research, Chris found that certain content elements contribute more to webpage size than others. These are:

• Images, particularly photos.
• Videos.
• Animations.

While animations are rarely used on the University’s websites, images and videos are used much more. However, from the conversations with web publishers, these content types are used to engage audiences and present information in a visually appealing way. Therefore, it’s not always as simple as just removing them.

We need to understand user and business needs before implementing solutions

Chris tested and experimented with a range of solutions to reduce carbon emissions on webpages, including:

• Removing images.
• Compressing images.
• Removing videos.
• Removing text content and webpages altogether.

All of these actions reduce the carbon emissions of webpages, but not all of them would be suitable for the publishers we spoke to. Some solutions worked better than others, depending on the needs of the website.

For example, one lead publisher wanted to keep images on their webpages for marketing purposes, so image compression was a better solution than removal in this case.

For another website, Chris created a prototype which had less text, fewer pages and no images. He tested this in a usability study with six participants and found that they could successfully complete key tasks using the prototype. These results indicated that reducing pages and removing images could be a suitable solution for this case.

My key takeaway from this work was that sustainable web design practice isn’t really anything new: it’s about establishing key requirements and user needs, and then testing solutions to check that the requirements are met.

This internship taught important UX skills in an office setting

During the three months, Chris completed a huge range of activities, including:

• Speaking to stakeholders to uncover their website requirements and communicating recommendations.
• Researching design best practices and seeing how these are implemented across other websites.
• Analysing data from web analytics to understand what users consider to be the most important information on a webpage.
• Creating wireframes and prototypes of university webpages that meet requirements and address user needs.
• Usability testing prototypes with target audiences to see whether users could complete key tasks with a more sustainable website design.

I am really proud of all the work that Chris, Catalina and Osh have achieved this year, and I hope that this experience has been valuable for them and their future careers.

I’ve learned a lot about running student internships

I really enjoyed my time managing the Green Digital Design internship and it was great to see all the preparation work come together in the summer. I learned a lot about planning, recruiting and running a summer placement, all of which I hope I can use to improve any internships I run in the future.

For example, next time I would try to encourage students from all degree programmes to consider applying for a UX internship, as every subject area provides transferable skills for design and research work.

I also hope this post encourages more colleagues to take on interns for their projects because students can offer fresh ideas, new perspectives and plenty of enthusiasm!

Blog posts from our student interns

Diving into sustainable UX: my first 4 weeks as a Green Digital Design Intern by Chris O’Neill

Exploring Digital Sustainability: Insights from the Start of My Green Web Estate Internship by Osh Doherty

Behind the Screens and my Green Web Internship: The Environmental Cost of Digitality by Catalina Rincon