8. Testing, assessing, and maintaining

Testing the service from different levels of connectivity

This step consists in making sure that the service functions well even in conditions of "poor" connectivity, such as 3G. With an eco-design approach, it is essential not to push users to renew their smartphones by keeping browsing accessible without a 4G or 5G chip. As described in the section What are the environmental stakes?, it is the hardware that represents the most significant environmental impact of digital services. In addition, making the service accessible from poorer connectivity conditions and older devices reduces the digital divide.

Use tools such as lowband.com or the developer tools from Firefox to simulate a low-bandwidth internet connection and make sure the website remains accessible.

Assessing the service as a whole

Assessing the user journey

As was done in the first step, go over the user journey once again with GreenIT Analysis using the same functional unit and comparing your results with the earlier version of your service.

In addition, compare the size of the pages and the user journey to what you had set as a target for your “environmental budgeting”.

You can also complete your assessment with performance measuring tools such as GTmetrix, Lighthouse, Yellow Lab Tools.

Assessing the implementation of best practices

You can use the compliance repository from the Sustainable Digital Design Collective (Collectif Conception Numérique Responsable (French)) and the General Repository for the Eco-design of Digital Services (Référentiel Général d'Ecoconception de Services Numériques (RGESN) (French)) to help you assess the implementation of best practices.

Ensuring accessibility

Obviously, it is crucial to integrate accessibility all along the design process and not wait until the end of the project to work on it. Testing accessibility and verifying that best practices have been correctly implemented also helps ensure the quality and cohesiveness of the information architecture, which contributes to the eco-design approach as a whole.

Much like in the case of eco-design tools, accessibility tools are not a magic bullet and they cannot replace the watchful eye of a designer (only 20% of issues can be detected by tools). Nonetheless, some of them can help you assess accessibility on your website:

• WAVE (Web Accessibility evaluation tool) to verify accessibility guidelines compliance
• No Coffee to assess colors
• Colour Contrast Analyser to assess color contrast
• Web Developer Extension to assess structure
• Kit d'audit RGAA: Tools and templates to conduct an audit

This list is far from being exhaustive, do not hesitate to consult the accessibility repositories for more information.

Preparing for service and content updates

Transferring knowledge and training

It is worthwhile to consider the skills of those who will "inherit" this service. Beyond creating an eco-designed service, it is essential to make sure it remains one. The only way to do so is to train the people who will take over the service after its launch and transfer all necessary information to them.

Questions to be answered:

• Who will update the content?
• What are the best practices and skills to impart to future content editors?

Setting up a periodical content review

As Gerry McGovern underlined in his book, World Wide Waste, we have a bad habit of creating and publishing content without considering what will become of it:

Therefore, building a strategy of regularly reviewing content and assigning people to oversee this effort is heavily recommended.

Questions to be answered:

• How often will content be reviewed?
• Who will "sort"? What are the guidelines for automating this "sorting"?
• How long is content expected to stay up?
• How will data, user accounts, etc., be handled at the end of their lifecycle?

For instance, YouTube currently has billions of videos up on its platform. 720 000 hours of content are uploaded every day. The company could consider implementing an expiry date for these videos by dictating that any video which has not been viewed in the past three years should be automatically deleted.