In recent years, the web development industry has made websites more sustainable through green hosting and sustainable approaches in both back-end and front-end levels of websites. This study evaluates and aims to improve existing guidelines for designing lower-impact websites in the e-commerce sector. First, the study investigates the Internet users’ awareness of the Internet’s carbon footprint and their impressions of existing lower-impact websites. This data is then used to construct and conduct focus groups. The Internet’s impact on the environment and existing lower-impact website solutions are further analysed and dis-cussed in the grocery e-commerce context. These findings are then used as a base to build a lower-impact grocery e-commerce website prototype and test it with users and evaluate its attractiveness based on a hedonic/pragmatic model. The study reveals that users are pretty acceptive of the front-end changes to a website to make it more sustainable and willing to change their online habits. However, as current user awareness and knowledge about the Internet’s carbon footprint is very low, any changes to the User Experience (UX) of a website to make it more sustainable need to be communicated to the user.

This study investigates the impact of sustainable design practices on the visual elements of websites, with a focus on their potential to mitigate environmental harm. The principal area of interest is efficiency - designing web pages to minimize energy usage.  In pursuit of sustainable design principles, websites from companies and organizations that advocate for the environment were analyzed. This was done to determine whether these websites are implementing sustainable design principles within their visual elements. Two custom React web pages were subsequently developed: one implementing design principles from the analyzed websites and the other integrating sustainable design principles. Standardized tools and metrics, including Ecograder, Google Lighthouse, and Google PageSpeed Insights, were used to assess the performance and energy efficiency of these pages in order to measure any discrepancies. From previous research, the results identified five most common design principles as principal considerations in website design. Interestingly, many of the companies/organizations were found to partially or completely disregard these sustainable design principles in their web pages. Additionally, the React web page that incorporated sustainable design principles demonstrated a significantly lighter page weight compared to its modern design counterpart, resulting in less energy usage. Further research is needed though to corroborate these results due to the limitations of the measurements in this study.

Digital communication through communication platforms has increased and changed significantly during the last decade and recently not least because of the corona pandemic, which has shifted many face-to-face activities to the internet (Obringer R. , et al., 2021). This paper firstly contains a quantitative survey study that investigates human behaviour and their experience on digital communication platforms with a focus on media transfer of photos and videos. Afterwards, the data sizes of various media after transfers through diverse communication platforms are explored in an experiment. This is followed by the development of a prototype in which sustainable design is implemented and aim to nudge the user to more sustainable-friendly digital behaviour relating data transfers of media and the settings of a communication platform. Finally, the prototype undergoes usability testing through which the user experience and positive environmental impact is evaluated. The findings reveal that the implementation of sustainability-focused nudges, features and design within a communication platform can lead users to more sustainable decisions in one or more areas of the platform and thus improve its environmental footprint.