2. Implementing

Once the knowledge and the skills have been built up, they can be applied to concrete projects! No need to set up a complete eco-design approach overnight! We recommend starting small. Here are some leads you can explore, from a simple self-assessment, to large scale implementation.

a. Auditing

With Designers Ethiques' workshops, as well as other training programs, you will likely learn how to assess the carbon footprint of a user journey. See Assessing and Measuring.

For instance, these are things you can do:

Individually

1. Test user journeys with poor connectivity (an average 3G connection for instance) with development tools in your browser (see how to do this). This makes it possible to quantify targets involving user experience, eco-design and web performance.
2. Assess the user journey's footprint corresponding to the functional unit of your website or those of your clients. See Assessing and Measuring.
3. Identify pages/features that are the least in line with eco-design principles in order to start making regular improvements on a limited and manageable scale.
4. Present the results of the assessment of the footprint to your teams/management while using eloquent examples: for X yearly users, the equivalent water use is X olympic-size swimming pools, and the carbon footprint is equivalent to X km driven by car (See comparison tool Impact CO2 (French)).
5. Compare your results with those of competitors by measuring their performance or by using publicly available tools (See the GreenIT barometer (French)).
6. Assess the footprint of websites you have worked on after 6 months to see their evolution over time and identify areas that have improved or worsened.

As a team

1. Self-audit with the RGESN (Référentiel Général de l'Ecoconception des Services Numériques - General Repository for the Eco-design of Digital Services) (French) and share your questions and concerns on the #communaute_rgesn channel of our Designers Ethiques Slack.
2. Systematically include eco-design auditing practices into your projects' audits.
3. Analyze the design system and the frameworks employed to verify that they do not overburden the DOM.
4. Implement automated analysis solutions on the website (automated GreenIT-Analysis, or paid alternative) to follow changes over time.

b. Optimizing

Auditing your service, whether it is done in a simplified or comprehensive manner, will have allowed you to identify "quick wins", actions that do not necessitate significant amounts of work to implement but can rapidly improve performances. Here are some examples:

• Cleaning up obsolete contents: sometimes, old articles, or FAQ pages fail to draw any users, or even frustrate them with outdated information. Cleaning this up can boost your service's performances.

• Clarify functional units: define them clearly, as a team, and come to an agreement about their order of priority. This can be achieved through a strategy workshop within 90 minutes. See the definition of a functional unit.
• Simplify the content of your pages: simple pages with well structured content make the user journey shorter and therefore lessen its environmental impact.

• Simplify the user journeys: identify elements that users struggle to understand and propose a streamlined journey. For instance, reduce the number of clicks to accomplish a recurring task.
• Remove unnecessary features: involve the users in identifying features that get little to no use, and, if it is possible, remove them to reduce the footprint and make maintenance easier.
• Be vigilant when applying best practices, especially regarding images. See Persuading and raising awareness.
• Propose technical improvements: this requires a fair bit of technical knowledge, but depending on your audit, you can propose removing certain features, improving caching solutions, optimizing queries, etc.
• Implement a policy of archiving/removing content and data.

c. Experimenting

Once you have analyzed your service's performance, you can define a limited scope to get to work on:

• a process of continued improvements: if you are about to revise a page or a feature, you might as well include eco-design principles in your approach
• small-scale experimentation: A/B testing eco-designed pages
• a redesign/eco-design of the website: leading a pilot project for an eco-designed website, writing the first eco-design pledge, etc.

d. Using all available tools

When implementing eco-design into your projects, you will be building up your toolbox. But why should we all reinvent the wheel on our own? Putting those resources in common, sharing those tools, would actually help spread eco-design principles on a wide scale.

1. Identify other people who are interested or invested in eco-design within your organization so that you may pool your resources together, and share knowledge, initiatives, and work or management techniques, etc.
2. Create reusable resources:
   • pages presenting the eco-design approach for clients so that all the arguments are made readily available to persuade them (budget, time, maintenance, etc.)
   • tools such as checklists and plugins to be used on a daily basis
   • lists of best practices sorted by profession (contributor, front-end developer, etc.)
   • etc.
3. Make those resources and techniques available in open source

e. Rolling out the improvements

Once the resources have been structured and tested, it is possible to incorporate eco-design principles in every stage of the work process.

Here are some examples:

• Ahead of a project, set some objectives/eco-design targets.
• Incorporate UX ahead of the UI design phase to make sure that optimizing the user journey will be possible if necessary.
• Be more thorough when challenging the client's needs (as opposed to the real expectations of your users).
• Include eco-design in the workshop phases of a feature (with the developers and designers). For instance, define/implement an Eco-Score for each feature when designing the project.
• Include eco-design criteria in the arbitration.
• Design in mobile-first.
• Include eco-design into every new project.

See more of our best practices in the eco-design guide.

To speed up the integration of this approach some initiatives can be helpful:

• Name a point-person within the organization to carry and facilitate the eco-design implementation.
• Establish a team of interested people to make it easier for others to become representatives and garner more support.
• Have people in charge of controlling eco-design compliance in the same way that you would for accessibility.
• Include eco-design into your OKR (learn more about the OKR framework).
• Include eco-design into your individual/professional objectives.
• Modify the purchase process to extend the lifecycle of your hardware (computers, screens, smartphones, etc.). See the MinumEco guides.

The implementation of those policies will depend a lot on the support you will enjoy within your organization, the mission and goals set, and the maturity of your organization on this topic in general.