About

Challenge:
Reduce web page energy draw and carbon output, and improve page load speed, without degrading the user experience

Client:
Vodafone

My Role:
Sustainable UX Designer

Key Outcomes

The home page was the obvious starting point, and the data confirmed it

Future Scouting↗ is one of my personal design projects, where I research and experiment with life-centred design, sustainable UX, and futuring — producing Medium articles, tools, and guidebooks. The site is built on WordPress.

With many pages to consider, starting sustainable thinking in digital can feel overwhelming. I began by reviewing analytics to identify the highest-traffic pages, then chose the home page as the starting point.

Benchmarking

I used online carbon calculators to measure the home page’s baseline carbon output and load speed — the numbers to beat from here on.

Assessing for sustainable UX opportunities

Using sustainable UX best practices as a guide, I assessed every UX and UI element on the home page for opportunities to improve.

Addressing the four energy eaters cut carbon by 87.5% in one round

Based on the assessment, I addressed each energy eater directly on the home page — one of the highest-traffic pages.

Results after Iteration 1

I ran a sketching session with the wider squad to generate ideas from non-designers, then developed the strongest ideas into first-iteration wireframes, building toward hi-fi designs as testing progressed.

A carousel added, tested, then cut—if it doesn’t earn its energy, it goes

With the biggest energy eaters addressed, Iteration 2 focused on content efficiency and honest testing—including adding a feature only to remove it when the energy cost wasn’t justified by usage.

Home page improvements

With the biggest energy eaters addressed, Iteration 2 focused on content efficiency and honest testing—including adding a feature only to remove it when the energy cost wasn’t justified by usage.

Site-wide technical improvements

Beyond the design and content work, I also made a set of more technical changes across the entire site—not visible to users, but with a meaningful impact on energy use and load performance.

Results after Iteration 2

Small tweaks over time brought load speed down another 80%

Sustainable UX isn’t a project with an end date — it’s an ongoing practice. Beyond the two defined iterations, I’ve continued making small improvements over time, tracked against the same benchmark metrics.

The carbon output has stayed stable at 0.21g per view. The biggest gain from ongoing work has been in load speed, which continued to drop well below the Iteration 2 result.

A measurable digital transformation for sustainability

Across two defined iterations and ongoing tweaks, the site went from one of the worst-performing pages I’d assessed to one of the cleanest, without any degradation to the user experience.

Beyond the numbers

The work also proved a few things about how to do sustainable UX well — testing assumptions, addressing root causes systematically, and looking past design alone for impact.