Sustainable UX
What if every digital product used only the energy it truly needed?
What if the websites and apps we designed actively encouraged people to make kinder choices for the planet?
This is the premise of Designing Futures.
Sustainable UX is the practice of designing digital experiences that use less energy, produce less carbon, and encourage planet-friendlier user behaviours, without sacrificing usability or business goals. It’s grounded in the W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines, a globally developed framework bringing together best practices across UX, development, design, and business strategy to reduce the environmental impact of digital products.
I’ve been developing my Sustainable UX practice through direct application—testing strategies on my own websites, learning what works in the real world, and bringing more nature into digital design through non-human personas and life-centred journey maps.
I’ve presented alongside Thorsten Jonas and Sandy Dähnert at events in Germany, and taken the practice directly into commercial design teams to put knowledge in designers’ hands as they work. Small wins in commercial UX compound into big impacts, and getting Sustainable UX into everyday design practice is one of my core goals.
The Sustainable UX Hub
Everything I’ve learned, built, and gathered is available at the Sustainable UX Hub on the LCD Lab—tools, inspirational projects, strategies, and resources to help designers start reducing the digital footprint of their work today.
Learn Sustainable UX
I’ve translated this practice into a suite of online, on-demand courses for digital designers—covering Sustainable UX, Low-Carbon UX, Life-centred Digital Design, and Non-human Personas. Whether you’re starting out or going deep, there’s a course to meet you where you are.
Teaching & Speaking
I’ve taken Sustainable UX into classrooms, organisations, and design communities — from co-hosting workshops with the Sustainable UX Network in Hamburg alongside Thorsten Jonas and Sandy Dähnert, to presenting at WooliesX and Telstra design teams in Sydney. The goal is always the same: raise awareness of what digital design choices cost the planet, and leave designers with practical tools to act on it.
My Sustainable UX Tools
The best way to change design practice is to put tools directly in designers’ hands.
The Sustainable UX Buddy is a free reference tool giving designers instant access to sustainable design strategies as they work — without breaking their flow.
The Life-centred Journey Map expands the standard user journey map to include the impacts of design decisions on marginalised users, invisible non-users, animals, and environments — giving all life a voice across the full experience being designed.
Non-human Personas bring nature into the digital design process — giving rivers, ecosystems, species, and communities a voice in decisions that affect them.