5.4 Communicate the Ecological Impact of User Choices

Allowing the visitor to take action to reduce their emissions is key to helping them play a part in becoming more sustainable. By helping them identify when choices they make could have an environmental impact (and by how much) and then providing them with the tooling choices to reduce their footprint, you can empower them to make a lasting difference.

Criteria

Impact Communication: The ecological implications of visitor choices have been clearly communicated and visitors can configure settings based on those choices.

Impact

Medium

Effort

Medium

Benefits

Environmental:
More ecologically friendly software settings are designed to improve the environmental impact of a product or service. Empowering the visitor will also allow you indirectly to reduce emissions.
Performance:
Sustainability is inherently tied into accessibility and web performance, as such the benefits these fields bring can have a positive impact on the way your website or application works.
Conversion:
By clearly communicating the impact, allowing the visitor to set preferences can potentially encourage more individuals to make ecologically friendly choices, thereby increasing adoption rates from those who look for sustainable or ethical brands.

GRI

materials: Medium
energy: Medium
water: Medium
emissions: Medium

Example

Using CSS media queries, you can adjust the layout of a website based on ecological preferences such as color, data, animation, and more.

Resources

View the Guideline