Sustainable UX: Opportunities to impact and Responsibilities to accept
Over the past 20 years, we have improved massively on building outstanding digital experiences for our users. But, how sustainable were the experiences we built? In fact, it is one of our biggest challenges to make sustainability default in our product building processes.
As a UX community, over the last 20 years, we have improved massively on building outstanding digital experiences for our users. But, how sustainable were and are the digital experiences we build? We improve the convenience for our users, but we fail to balance it with the negative impacts on the surrounding ecosystems. We analyze, define and measure every little step of our users, but our tools fail to create transparency about all the other actors in the system.Finding justice between convenience and negative impacts, between profit and greater good is one of the major challenges of these days.UX with its important role in the whole product creation process has to play a significant role here.
We need to change some of the core paradigms of UX and product design. And we need to do it together, with the UX community as well as all other people involved in building a digital product - to make sustainability the new default in our product building processes.
Thorsten Jonas
Founder of the Sustainable UX network
As a strategic UX Consultant with more than 15 years experience in agencies and for international clients, Thorsten helps companies and design-teams to innovate with care and to create more sustainable, responsible and ethical digital products.Being the long year Director UX for a large digital Agency in Germany, Thorsten quit his job in 2020 to put more focus on the major issues we are facing as human beings and society. Nowadays he helps companies building more responsible digital products and experiences as well as to establish Sustainability and Responsibility in their build and design processes.
As one of the outcomes, in 2021 Thorsten started the non-profit global community and initiative „SUX – the Sustainable UX Network“ with an international group of designers, to push Sustainable UX and Design further for and with the digital creative community.