2.4 Consider Sustainability in Early Ideation

While some things require the use of electricity, during the early ideation phase you could consider wireframing or rapid prototyping (using paper) among other offline tools to reduce energy consumption. Even the electronic versions of these may have a lower carbon cost than committing to building a full-blown experience for each idea.

Criteria

Wireframes And Prototypes: Wireframes, and rapid prototyping are utilized to quickly build consensus, reduce risk, and lower the number of resources needed to build features.
Participation And Testing: Users are involved within the iteration and design process using participatory design, and when conducting user-testing reach out to your community to help improve your product by allowing them to apply their knowledge and experience to your product or service.

Impact

Low

Effort

Low

Benefits

Environmental:
Incorporating wireframes, prototypes, and user-testing into early product design cycles improves environmental impact by helping product teams build only the features visitors want. This reduces resource use and lowers emissions.
Economic:
Early rough ideation can improve financial performance, since organizations won’t waste time and money building features people don’t use.
Conversion:
Tested user-interfaces often improve conversion rates as they have been optimized to remove confusing aspects of the layout that cause problematic friction and arrange content to optimize the fastest user flow (which can help emissions).

GRI

materials: Low
energy: Low
water: Low
emissions: Low

Example

A website wireframe example from SlickPlan.

Resources

View the Guideline