Introducing Our 90-Minute Sustainability Hack Format

The Challenge: Can you identify meaningful Sustainability product interventions in just 90 minutes?

We decided to experiment, inviting a client in the water sector to participate in a new ‘hack’ format. Using their app as a project for our 90-minutesession, we invited their design and development team and brought our in-house sustainability experts from across four practices, including overall sustainability strategy, sustainable design, green software and responsible data.

So, what defines a good sustainable digital product? It should be inclusive, reduce waste and friction for the user, support them in making better choices, be lightweight and accessible, use design systems, repurpose components, reduce data transfer, be interoperable with older devices and poorer connections, be designed with resilience for longevity and ideally save time and money for both user and client (sounds like a pretty long list, right?!)

With this in mind, we reviewed the proposed screens for the app with questions in mind. Is it accessible? How will the data be stored and how long will it be saved for? We also explored better formats for images and video and created a list of potential interventions to reduce the impact on environment and improve social outcomes for users.

The ‘take-home’ benefits for our clients

• An increased level of understanding: One of the key challenges in a session like this, is that not everyone will have the same level of working knowledge on the subject. With this particular client, having a set of guiding principles and outlining them at the beginning was critical to ensuring we were all using the same lens. It was also useful to point out that ‘sustainability’ is a lot wider than ‘reducing carbon’ and also includes wellbeing, accessibility and inclusion. Following on from this, outside of the session, the client will now be able to identify other opportunities within their business.

• Bringing your corporate strategy to life: Establishing your long-term sustainability goals will not only allow you to dictate the direction you’d like the service to take, but it also helps teams see the bigger pictures and the changes that’ll ladder up to that overall strategy. For example, our client had targeted to be net zero by 2030, and this helped them see the gap between their goals and how teams on the ground can deliver it. There are further opportunities for the client to develop a sustainability strategy.

• Increase in brand reputation through compliance as well as leading ‘best practice’: With many facets of sustainability becoming increasingly important, the client can enhance their reputation through not only following compliance but leading best practice examples to their counterpart organisations, investors and consumers.

• Cost reduction: The most obvious, and arguably the reason that will resonate with most, is that sustainable thinking is often linked to cost reduction. With reduced energy consumption, costs of hosting, waste reduction, people efficiency – organisations can quickly make significant savings by making lots of small changes. e.g. limiting the number of photos that can be uploaded, reducing character limit, reviewing data retention policies.
  

• More collaborative culture with better outcomes: Focusing on the sustainable business initiatives can boost employee engagement through ownership and accountability which in turn builds better products and services for your customers.

• Understanding the importance of measuring: Defining KPIs that you can benchmark and continue to measure throughout your Sustainability journey is key to understanding the impact you’re making. Our data team have been developing a Net Positive metrics framework, including carbon and social value metrics in our client reporting dashboards – reach out if you’d like to know more on this.

Some of the other key learnings from the hack included:

• If possible, making sure there is a working prototype/wireframes: to make for a more interactive session, but to also provide those who aren’t involved in the project with a more visual component when it comes to the user journey and interaction points. You could do a similar exercise for a live project, using screenshots.

• Accepting that product doesn’t need to be ‘in development’ - and embracing lots of ‘small’ changes: Throughout our session we found lots of examples where we were able to use our sustainability lens for a Net Positive win e.g. limiting the number of photos that can be uploaded, reducing character limit, reviewing data retention policies. All of those things may not make a big impact on their own but multiplying it by the number of potential users across the year can generate a reduction in cost and carbon emissions, limiting the dependence on data storage.

• Knowing what trade-offs you’re able to make: By having a diverse group of expertise in the room, we were able to tackle this from different (and complementary) points of view. For example, users have identified a need for data synchronisation between devices – great for them, but not for sustainability purposes. By having this conversation and quantifying the impact, we were able to suggest compromises to deliver an overall Net Positive outcome.

Did the Hack work? 

It’s an extremely useful format to identify quick, easily implementable wins, and also some of the longer-burn, more systemic changes that may be needed to improve sustainable outcomes. Quite often the interventions require resetting defaults within an IT organisation, such as the archiving process or switching the onus on saving documents and the session enabled us to start these conversations with the client. These changes will potentially ladder up to much broader social and environmental impacts in the future, once implemented at scale across multiple projects and business units.

It’s also a great sustainability awareness-driver for teams to come together and discuss the implications of choices in a very real way, weighing up the relative merits of specific design, development and data decisions for social and environmental outcomes as well as economic (broadening the traditional business case to include people and planet).

We’d be happy to share our Miro format for the session and talk you through or approach – just get in touch if you’d like to know more.

It's important to note we didn’t just focus on environmental factors – at Transform, we take a broad approach to Sustainability, aligning our work to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Our proposition is to deliver Net Positive services for our clients, so our sustainability recommendations cover social, economic as well as environmental interventions.