A talk about intersectional design and how accessibility and sustainable overlap to create better products and experiences for both people and businesses

1. Bank of England & FCA
November 2023
People, Planet, Product:
an intersectional design approach
Danny Bluestone
Chief Digital Officer, Director

2. Hi, I’m Danny
@dannybluestone

3. Cyber-Duck leverages UX,
Service Design, and open
source technology to deliver
transformation beyond digital
@cyberduck_uk

4. Human centred
designer

5. Designing for people

6. The role of design so far…

7. What good design should deliver
Meaningful
Pleasurable
Convenient
Usable
Reliable
Functional (Useful)
Inspiration: https://marvelapp.com/blog/introduction-user-experience-design/

8. What poor design can look like - impact on people and business
Disconnected
experiences
Inaccessible
systems
Longer user
journeys/
dead ends
Frustration/
Rage clicking
Data
harvesting
Deceptive
UX
Slow-
moving
systems
Implicit
bias

9. Digital exclusion exacerbates
social/economic exclusion
Fraud/safety
Poor design has wider implications on people’s potential
Ableist barriers
Ageist barriers
Broken or inefficient
public services

10. Digital design - a missing component
Good
Design
Society
???
Economy
Accessibility
Delight
Usability
Utility
Efficiency
Privacy
Safety

11. Digital design has far wider implications

12. 1995
The average
webpage
weight was
15kb
2010
The average
webpage
weight was
702kb
2023
The average
webpage weight is
over 2MB
The largest page
found during one
study was 678MB
Data has grown inexorably in size
Source: https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2022/page-weight

13. What is data
WE CREATE ALMOST
1 EB DAILY (2023)

14. 1.98B
Websites in
existence, 56.5B
pages indexed
by Google. Only
200m sites are
active
56B
Hours per year
spent watching
just YouTube
and TikTok
alone
(5 years+ of a
persons life?)
5.7m
Apps on Google
Play, Apple App
Store & Amazon
alone with 285 bn
downloads
expected by 2023
m
4
Podcasts at an
absolute
minimum,
growing every
day
A vast bloated digital product ecosystem (that’s hard to measure)
Sources: The Podcast Index 4.2m podcasts in their index, Mar 2022 | Online Microtransaction Global Market Report 2022 - Reportlinker |
https://www.businessdit.com/average-time-spent-on-tiktok/ | https://www.globalmediainsight.com/blog/youtube-users-statistics/ |
https://www.statista.com/statistics/611707/online-video-time-spent/ | https://firstsiteguide.com/how-many-websites/

15. Computing power
demand now doubles
every two months,
compared to every 24
months before 2012
zetabytes
Stratospheric data growth
175
of data created,
captured, copied,
and consumed
worldwide every
year by 2025
=
Sources: US’ NDC | https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351221765_Brain-inspired_computing_We_need_a_master_plan

16. The result?
ICT’s GHG footprint already
outstrips the aviation industry,
equivalent to being the 4th
largest country carbon emitter,
and growing rapidly.
Sources: ITC's total emissions from a 2021 study by Freitag et al. compared with fossil CO2 emissions by country,
using data from 2020 from the European Union's Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR)

17. “The typical data centre uses
about 3-5 million gallons of
water per day - the same
amount of water as a city of
30,000 to 50,000 people”
Prof. Venkatesh Uddameri, Water Resources Center at Texas Tech University.

18. Digital design’s business as usual must change

19. Designing for planet

20. Bad design worsens digital’s environmental impact
Inaccessible systems
Longer user journeys/
dead ends
Frustration/
Rage clicking
Data harvesting
Deceptive UX
Slow-moving systems
Implicit bias
Slow-moving systems
Disconnected experiences

21. Wasted
energy,
water,
resources
Additional/replicated user journeys
Wasted user journeys
Wasted downloads
Failed user journeys
Unnecessary user sessions
Unnecessary reloads
Unnecessary data capture/sharing
Unnecessary data storage
Inaccessible systems
Longer user journeys/
dead ends
Frustration/
Rage clicking
Data harvesting
Deceptive UX
Slow-moving systems
Implicit bias
Bad design worsens digital’s environmental impact

22. Good
Design
Society
Environment
Economy
Intersectional design
built on sustainable
foundations
Accessibility
Delight
Usability
Utility
Efficiency
Privacy
Safety
Better digital design means intersectional design

23. What does it look like in practice?

24. INFRASTRUCTURE NET
ZERO
DESIGN FOR ‘LESS IS
MORE’
ARCHITECT FOR
HIERARCHY
The 10 foundations for
sustainable design
CONTENT
FOOTPRINT
ACCESSIBILITY PLAN
LEAN DATA
COLLECTION
TECHNICAL /ASSET
OPTIMISATION
ITERATION, ITERATION,
ITERATION
ORGANISATIONAL
CHANGE
FOCUS ON FINDABILITY
& TASKS
Resource: https://www.cyber-duck.co.uk/insights/resources/sustainable-by-web-design

25. Design for ‘less is more’

26. Design for ‘less is more’: set budgets
Total budget
<500Kb
Images/video
300Kb
25Kb
Fonts
HTML/CSS
40Kb
Javascript
50Kb
Inspiration: https://v3.danmall.com/articles/how-to-make-a-performance-budget/index.html

27. Design for ‘less is more’: trade-offs
Total budget
<500Kb
Images/video
180Kb
55Kb
Fonts
HTML/CSS
55Kb
Javascript
120Kb
Inspiration: https://v3.danmall.com/articles/how-to-make-a-performance-budget/index.html

28. Weight ≠ Emissions

29. Entity
Consolidation
Entity analysis
Infrastructure audits
Journey analysis
Data reviews
Site audits
Content
Consolidation
Content audit
Content strategy
Content governance
IA analysis
Content strategy
Reducing content and data footprint

30. Accessibility plan
The results from these data dictates that
interactive maps are not screen-reader
accessible at all…
Sayed Kamrul Hasan, Oslo Metropolitan University
To load the typical Google Map, it takes
about 70 requests which is 2 megabytes
extra page weight. Or up to 2-seconds
load time. On slower connections it’s even
more.
– Offsite resource

31. Focus on findability and tasks
Search

32. Architect for hierarchy
H1 30px Bold
H2 25px Bold
H3 20px Medium
H3 16px Medium
BTN 16px Book

33. Lean data collection
Name:
Email:
Phone:
Address:
Previous address:
Job title:
Name:
Email:
Phone:
Register
Back
Inspiration: https://www.mightybytes.com/blog/design-a-sustainable-data-strategy/

34. Asset optimisation
</>
Reduce file size

35. Make the planet a stakeholder persona?
Source: https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/8-steps-to-using-non-human-personas-in-digital-design-62aa02f8ae63

36. Get involved
Source: https://www.w3.org/community/sustyweb/

37. Get involved
Source: https://www.sustainablewebmanifesto.com/

38. Realise there’s no silver bullet, only research and optimisation
Source: https://www.publicissapient.com/industries/energy-commodities/tech-awards

39. INFRASTRUCTURE NET
ZERO
DESIGN FOR ‘LESS IS
MORE’
ARCHITECT FOR
HIERARCHY
The 10 foundations for
sustainable design
CONTENT
FOOTPRINT
ACCESSIBILITY PLAN
LEAN DATA
COLLECTION
TECHNICAL /ASSET
OPTIMISATION
ITERATION, ITERATION,
ITERATION
ORGANISATIONAL
CHANGE
FOCUS ON FINDABILITY
& TASKS
Resource: https://www.cyber-duck.co.uk/insights/resources/sustainable-by-web-design

40. And that’s why an intersectional
approach to design really is…
Designing for people and planet

41. And that’s why an intersectional
approach to design really is…
Designing for people and planet

42. THANK YOU
Matt Gibson, Cyber-Duck
matt@cyber-duck.co.uk
@cyberduck_uk