Q&A With Claire Thornewill

Claire Thornewill at UXDX Community: Ireland & UK. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AQnEVWLog4

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Awareness and green hosting

[00:00:00] Host: Now, as Catherine mentioned, we are a little bit behind, so we're going to jump straight over to our next talk, which is actually a Q&A with Claire Thornewill, who gave a great talk, I hope you've had the opportunity to watch it, around web performance and sustainable web design. So welcome, Claire.

[00:00:18] Claire: Hi, thank you. Thank you for having me.

[00:00:22] Host: What I really loved about your talk was that you presented the data very effectively, that it's not a pretty picture, but then there were also the clear actions that people could take.

[00:00:39] Claire: Yeah. At the end of the day, and it applies to everything, it's about our behavior, and the first thing is to become aware of our behavior. I brought up the example of the tote bag. I genuinely thought I was being good for the environment, and then you start reading things and you're like, oh my god, that's actually really bad. I need to use my tote bags ten thousand, I don't know how many, times. And I guess for me one of the biggest things, also in UX, is just awareness. It's missing in so many places: the awareness of what UX is, what it's for, and all these things. I feel like as UX designers, people are constantly trying to justify themselves. So across the board of what I do, awareness is a big topic, because it's the same with web performance.

[00:01:38] Host: Can I be a bit of a devil's advocate, because it's always good to get a bit of friction? If we just got green hosting, does that solve all the problems, and then we don't need to worry about any of the other things with our web designs?

[00:01:58] Claire: That's a tough one. It's definitely a step in the right direction. I don't think it solves all the problems. Again, that's not us changing our behavior; it's the big easy step. It's like saying, at home, I've changed my electricity to eco electricity, but at the same time I'm still using the electricity. I switch the light on; I do consciously switch it off when I leave the room. So it's like that as well. Yes, it's a huge step in the right direction, but it doesn't solve all our problems. It's the same as carbon offsetting, right? It doesn't solve anything.

[00:02:41] Host: It's just throwing money at the problem. Carbon offsetting just means you haven't changed your behavior, but it makes it okay. And a lot of those carbon offsetting schemes, unfortunately, are a little dubious.

Incentives and the tragedy of the commons

[00:02:57] But one thing, and I'm going to be honest now, and I don't like it, is that people will change behavior based on incentives. I don't know if you've heard of the tragedy of the commons: if there's a commons that everybody can use and nobody has to pay for it, then why should anybody pay for it? That's the thinking. The commons here would be the environment. You're not getting in trouble for adding those extra images, and you're not seeing the effect of it. So when there's not that direct, immediate impact of my actions, how can we get people to change their behaviors?

[00:03:44] Claire: Oh, that's a tough one. Isn't that a really tough question? When you talk about sustainable web design in particular, web performance is one of those things that actually has an effect on the speed of your website, which brings you down in your ratings for Google, for example. So you actually are penalized, particularly with Core Web Vitals. There's a huge hype about it at the moment, but you have to hit a certain quota on certain things to be higher up in the ranking. So from a business perspective, you are incentivized to do better and have better web performance.

[00:04:26] On the other side, it's a tough one, isn't it? Particularly when you're talking about the environment. I think half the world doesn't believe it's such a problem, and half the world believes, well, it doesn't affect me. It's a really tough one. I think it's one step at a time. I'm learning myself. I mentioned in my talk that I started making my own shampoo and conditioner bars, because that's a little less plastic, a few fewer plastic bottles. And then I'm thinking it doesn't make sense to sell it [?], because that also raises awareness, and all these things.

[00:05:07] So it's more that everybody has to change their behavior a little bit, and if everyone changes it a little bit, then we're one step further. It's the same with the emails I was discussing in my talk. If we all sent one email less, it would make a difference. At the end of the day, the carbon emission of one email doesn't make a huge difference, right? But four billion people are probably using their email almost on a daily basis. If we just used it a little less, a little more efficiently, then that would make a difference.

[00:05:40] And that's my point; that's why I'm here. I just want to raise awareness. I'm not an expert in the field myself; I only recently learned about it, because I'm now in the role of a web performance consultant, and I just want to share that story and raise awareness, particularly in the UX field, because we have the responsibility to design. It was interesting to hear the topic of human-centered design. I read something the other day and I was like, wow, that's a good point: surely it should be humanity-centered design.

Humanity-centered design and anti-users

[00:06:14] Host: Yeah. There's a great talk, I can't remember what it was, but she used the example that Uber is great, but it's causing huge amounts of traffic and increasing the amount of pollution. So you have to think about the ecosystem impacts of changes as well.

[00:06:33] Claire: Yeah. I read an article just recently about inverse personas. We all think about the personas that we're designing for, but what we're not designing for is how people can abuse that system. So it's good to also sit down and make a persona for the evil person who might use it incorrectly. It makes sense, because there are so many examples. I would say the e-cigarette is a really good example. They went from tobacco to e-cigarettes, which are better for your health, I think, though I'm not an expert in that either. But what happened was there was then a huge craze among teenagers, and a huge problem with that, and that's something they didn't think about when they were designing it.

[00:07:21] I think that's what we have the responsibility to do when we're designing and defining and researching all these things: really think about, okay, we have our users, we know what we need for our users, but how do we design to avoid, I guess I would call them, anti-users, and to avoid any problems?

Making web performance a business conversation

[00:07:40] Host: One thing, just coming back to web performance: how can we make that a lot more visible? Because people forget. If we could make that really visible, with constant reminders to build those habits. What techniques or approaches do you use for that?

[00:08:00] Claire: It's an interesting question. We had a talk yesterday at work, because we have now created a tiny little new department for web performance, and we were talking to people who are making the big decisions in the company. An interesting thing that they said is that very often web performance is presented from a technical perspective, and it isn't presented from a business perspective. Very often it's just, oh yeah, the devs will do that. The devs will put asynchronous loading in there, and make sure that the header is fine and there aren't too many web fonts, and whatsoever.

[00:08:42] But again, it's awareness. So we're trying to push it in our company from a UX perspective and a marketing perspective, because it really matters. You might want to have all these wonderful pictures, but is there really a point to it? So we're trying to get in now with our clients as well, to really make them think, and say, okay, but this has an effect on your web performance. The nice thing about web performance is that it's one of those things that you can almost put data on and monetize. If your website is one second slower, and depending on your company's turnover, we calculated that if your company's turnover is, I think, above a million, then if it's one second faster, you could be saving yourself 150,000 euros.

[00:09:30] It's one of those things where we can say, okay, we can make you money or save you a huge amount of money. With UX, very often it's quite subjective, because your users always have opinions. Yes, you can gather data on that, but web performance is one of those things where it's, okay, well, you will go down in the ranking; we will save you X amount of money for one second faster on your website. So it's awareness raising, really.

[00:09:58] Host: That's great, thanks very much for the chat. I really enjoyed the session, so if anybody hasn't seen it, do check it out; it's available online now. So thank you, Claire, and thank you for raising awareness.