We’ve been developing a survey to identify wasteful digital behavior. About 180 people completed a test version. There follows a highlight of the most interesting results. 60% of respondents said that it was not easy to find content and other information on their organization’s intranet or other internal systems. When we asked if they felt… Read More »

90% of data does not get used three months after it’s published. 91% of webpages never get found in Google. We have a global content waste industry feverishly producing enormous quantities of really expensive content that is essentially useless, and creating lots of CO2 pollution. Which perhaps helps to at least partially explain why the… Read More »

“We still live in a ‘publish and be damned’ world,” Sarah Winters says. “Now, it’s up. Now we can forget about it and move on to the next thing. I’d quite like to see if websites could only have a finite amount of pages, a finite amount of services because then it would be like… Read More »

On the Web, content is indeed critical. If we need more convincing of this statement, we only have to throw a cursory glance at current events. Content is driving the conversation. Content is leading to action. Content is critical. Sarah Winters defined the term ‘content design’ in the early days of GOV.UK, where she led… Read More »

It seems that before most people put their tech hat on, they carefully take their brain out. For every one good tech idea, I see at least nine really stupid and unnecessary ones. But most organizations can’t resist more technology. The new website I got built for customercarewords.com has no database because it doesn’t need… Read More »

All “free” systems are wasteful by design because a free system merely hides or displaces its costs. Take for example Google and Facebook. These so-called free services cost the earth. Even as both organizations vigorously participate in greenwashing, saying how they embrace renewable energy, they will always be engines of waste because they run online… Read More »

In the digital fairytale, the evil character is Delete and the hero is Save. Digital heaven is where nothing gets deleted and everything is saved and you never know what you might find if only you look in the right place. Digital designers and particularly software developers have a terror of deleting or removing. I… Read More »

The homepage for my website (customercarewords.com) used to weigh 957 KB. Through a series of design decisions, we were able to bring the size down to 70 KB. With the exact same amount of content. With the exact same visual design. A 93% saving in the CO2 pollution that page created. The rise of digital… Read More »

Did you ever wonder how much data you produce? In 2020, it was estimated that 1.7 megabytes of data were created every second for every person on earth. We have created more data in the last two years than in all of previous human history. When Liam Nugent shut down his digital agency, he calculated… Read More »

Digital’s easy and cheap creative capabilities trap us in a Cult of Volume. According to digital agency founder, Liam Nugent, “a typical designer or programmer sees their job as to do, to make things. They ‘outsource the thinking’ because it’s a job, because that’s what they’ve been told to do by a client or manager.”… Read More »