Green Patterns of User Interface Design: A Guideline for Sustainable Design Practices

Abstract

Despite aiming to lower the carbon cost, the growing digital footprint is concerning because of the energy consumed by data centers strewn across the globe. Analysis and distribution of large quantities of data, at these centers, account significantly to the rapidly rising global energy usage. Over the last decade, information service demand has increased manifold which has given rise to energy intensive computation techniques like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data Mining, just to name a few. Surprisingly, study shows otherwise, the energy consumption at data centers has risen by only 6% from 2010 to 2018 [1] due to global push for sustainability and technological advancements in data management and cooling systems.

This paper promotes the idea further by showing a new approach of efficient design practices, i.e. Green Patterns, in software product development cycle. We correlated the design choices made on User Interface (UI) to its contribution on energy cost, based on a study that suggests the energy consumption of a device is highly attributed to Displays [2]. We measured the energy efficiency of various UI components using three factors: (a) Page Weight (b) Interactive Time and, (c) Sync Time. In the second part of the study, we validated the proposed Green Patterns with users so that usability is not at all compromised while reducing the digital carbon footprint.