Would you be surprised if I said that scientists warn us that for a sustainable future, affluent citizens of the world need to drastically reduce their consumption level?

Overconsumption of “stuff” is one of the leading causes of environmental destruction and climate change. If we want a liveable planet, we should be working hard to figure out how to get people to consume less. And would you be surprised if I said that the opposite is happening? Companies are working their a** off to get people to consume more than they need or even want.

Online retailers are exploiting psychology, designing casino-like shopping experiences, and intentionally preventing critical thinking to sell more.

I work in digital design and do extensive research about pushy online shopping. I’m writing this article because I want to share my knowledge and help you recognize the problematic online shopping experiences.

Here is why you, a person who cares about the environment, should care about online shopping tricks:

• If we want to fight for a sustainable future, we need to address the overconsumption problem.
• If we want to address the overconsumption problem, we need to confront the impact of online shopping.
• To confront the impact of online shopping, we must recognize the powerful role e-commerce design plays in encouraging excessive, unnecessary consumption.

Speed in Shopping: Friend of the Retailer, Foe of the Mindful Consumer

E-commerce companies are not hiding their love for speedy shopping.

“The quicker you can whizz them [customers] through the checkout, the more seamless the journey becomes and the fewer chances there are for shoppers to back out.” — The Good, How A Fast Checkout Experience Can Improve Your Conversion Rate

Retailers are the first to claim that a quick checkout is in the best interest of the customer. They are doing a service for you. They are generously saving you time and energy by “whizzing you through” the checkout process.

But they rarely (if ever) talk about the long-term impact. Yes, you might save some seconds in the moment, but all this whizzing makes it too easy and compelling to make impulse decisions. Buying things that you will quickly regret, that will be a financial burden rather than a source of joy.

“Online shopping is too fast for good decisions” as Amanda Mull writes in a The Atlantic article.

“The order took maybe 15 seconds. I selected my size and put the shoes in my cart, and my phone automatically filled in my login credentials and added my new credit-card number. You can always return them, I thought to myself as I tapped the “Buy” button. Almost as soon as I’d paid, I snapped out of the mania that had briefly overtaken me, $190 (Jesus Christ) poorer but with one pair of Jetsons-looking shoes on their way to my apartment. It’s always a little horrifying to realize that advertising has worked on you, but this felt more like I had just watched the velociraptor in Jurassic Park learn to use the doorknob. I had completed some version of the online checkout process a million times before, but never could I remember it being quite so spontaneous and thoughtless. If it’s going to be that easy all the time, I thought to myself, I’m cooked.”

I’m sorry to break it to you Amanda, but it is going to be this easy if not easier to buy stuff you don’t want all the time.

Just Buy It: Retailers Want You to Act, Don’t Think

Speed is a feature, not a bug. If you slow down, if you have a bit more time to think, there is a big chance you realize that you don’t want to spend your hard-earned money on the useless cr*p that somehow found its way to your cart.

These moments of reflection, probably realizing that you don’t want to buy things, that is what I call critical thinking in shopping. And retailers want to avoid these moments like the plague. Because the less critical thinking you do, the more likely you are to buy more, and coincidentally, that’s in the retailer's interest.

I’m going to show you the tricks retailers use to prevent critical thinking, but first, we need some foundations. We need to understand how we make purchase decisions in general.

The 4 steps of purchase decision-making:

First, you have to be AWARE of the existence of a product. Maybe you see it in someone’s TikTok video, maybe you get a paid ad in your Instagram feed, maybe you see an ad on TV or in a magazine. At this stage, you are aware of the product, but you don’t feel that you want/need to buy it (yet).

Then you build up the DESIRE to buy the product. This can happen as a result of continuous exposure to the product (eg: seeing it in many TikTok videos, or getting many paid ads in your feed), or when you get convinced by clever marketing messages that this product will solve one of your problems.

After you develop the desire, you CONSIDER the purchase. You ask questions like: Is this something I really need or want? How will I use it? Can I afford it? Maybe you even do some research about the brand, or compare it with competitors to find the right brand for you.

And finally, after you considered the different aspects and decided that this is indeed something worth spending money on, you go to the retailer’s site to complete the PURCHASE. (I focus on online shopping in this article.)

Critical thinking in shopping

Critical thinking happens mostly in the DESIRE and CONSIDERATION steps as you are spending some time pondering: should I buy, should I not buy?

These two steps are more prominent when you are about to buy something expensive, like a new phone or a car. Because you have a finite amount of money, you take more time to look around and compare prices and specifications to find something good enough that you can afford.

Sometimes you might skip the critical thinking even with expensive items, as Amanda did when she impulse purchased a $190 shoe. We can thank credit cards and buy-now-pay-later microloans for the illusion of financial abundance. They allow us to buy unnecessary stuff we can’t actually afford. But I digress, this is a topic for another day.

The smaller the price tag, the more comfortable we are to skip the critical thinking part and jump from AWARENESS to PURCHASE. After all, we are talking about $10 here and there. (Psst, pro tip: $10 spent on stuff you don’t need here and there, adds up.)

Regardless of the price tag, the less you think about your purchase and the more impulse decisions you make, the better for the retailer. So they are applying different psychological and design tricks to get you from AWARENESS to PURCHASE the quickest way possible. Let’s take a closer look at some of these tricks.

5 Tricks E-Commerce Retailers Use to Cut Out Critical Thinking

Trick 01: Merging social media and e-commerce

Do you remember when social media was about connecting with your friends online? Then we entered the era of influencers, where you could get inspired by all the products they endorsed and go buy them for yourself. Then they started sharing links to the brands they promoted or to their storefronts to make it easier for you to buy the stuff they recommend.

And now we have arrived at the social commerce era, where TikTok and Instagram are more like marketplaces with built-in e-commerce rather than a place to connect with your friends. If you see something in a post, you can just click on shop and voila, you are a proud owner of a chicken lamp that you didn’t even know existed, let alone you wanted, literal minutes ago.

There are 2 design aspects I want to highlight here:

1. The first one is technically reducing the steps between Awareness and Purchase. Here is a visualization of how the steps from the purchase process disappeared as SoMe became more commercialized. Integrating checkout in the social media platform removes several clicks from the purchase process. Even compared to sharing a link to the product. The fewer clicks, the less time you have to think, and the less friction there is to break your shopping autopilot mode.
2. The second aspect I wanted to highlight is leveraging social proof to skip the Desire and Consideration steps. We know that influencers have massive power in swaying consumer decisions and actions. If there is an influencer you trust and love, you will trust their recommendations and will be more likely to buy.

So what’s happening in social commerce is that instead of becoming aware of a product and then mulling over the should I buy, should I not buy part, you jump to the conclusion that you need to have this product as your fav influencer has the same and swears by it.

As the Buy button is conveniently placed right in the app, there is no friction to give you a few seconds to consider your decision.

Trick 02: Nudges

Social proof is not the only psychological trick retailers use to speedrun the Desire step. They exploit other known cognitive biases. Cognitive biases are rules of thumb that help you make sense of the world. For example: a popular person endorses an item → it must be a good item and if they have it I want to have it too.

Unfortunately retailers got very good at understanding how to use these rules of thumb to make you think you want a product without you noticing that you don’t actually want the product. Here are three examples:

• Scarcity bias: Our brain is wired to sense that something is more valuable when there is only a limited amount available. When you see “There is only 3 left” from an item, fear of missing out (FOMO) kicks in, and you think: I don’t want to lose the opportunity to become a proud owner of this chicken lamp, let me buy now, before it runs out. And you are already clicking the buy button. You don’t actually want the chicken lamp, you just don’t want to miss the opportunity to buy one.

• Urgency bias: Similarly to scarcity bias, when something is available for a limited time, FOMO kicks in and we take action. Think countdown banners.

• Social Proof bias: humans are social animals who want to belong to groups to feel safe. That is why our decisions and behaviour is impacted by what others around us are doing. We already saw how an influencer endorsing a product is an example of social proof.
  Another example of social proof is using tags like “1k+ people bought this product” or showing 101 reviews with 4.8 rating. These are proof that others have bought the product and are satisfied with their purchase, so it is a safe choice. Even desirable.

The bottom line is that retailers understand consumer psychology very thoroughly and can pull the right levers at the right time to make you think you want or need a product. In reality, it is not the actual product you want, but rather you are responding to a strategically placed psychological trigger that influences your thinking.

Trick 03: Buy Now button

The Buy Now button is another tool to eliminate clicks between Awareness and Purchase.

As one article explicitly says:

“Click to buy [=Buy now] helps customers complete shopping within seconds and reduces the amount of time they have to reconsider their purchase.”

I have nothing to add here, just that my blood pressure always rises when I read these bluntly worded articles. So obvious that removing friction is not for the sake of the customer but for the business.

Psst, extra designer insight! E-commerce can take persuasion to the next level with visual design. If a button is bright and stands out against the background, it attracts attention and you are more likely to click on that than other buttons that are less prominent. We call these primary and secondary buttons.

When you see the Buy Now button as the primary button (instead of Add to cart) you know that the company really, desperately wants to trick you to Buy Now and skip critical thinking.

Trick 04: Quick Add

If you want to make thought-through decisions, you will spend some time on the CONSIDER step. You probably want to read a bit about the product you are about to buy, which normally you can do on the product page. For example about the material, or how to care for the product. Some companies even generously share sustainability insights like the origin of the material or supply chain to inform you about the impact of your purchase.

But since retailers want you to skip the critical thinking part, why would they make you go to the product page at all? You don’t need all that info to make a decision! You already know the stock is running low (scarcity) or that 200+ were sold recently (social proof), so just add it to your cart with the Quick Add option.

Quick Add is another way to get rid of clicks and reduce time spent in the CONSIDERATION step.

Trick 05: Saved card and personal details

Once you are ready to check out, the retailer’s goal is to glide you through the checkout process with the minimum amount of friction so you won’t stop to reconsider your purchase. That is why they store your credit card info, home and billing address etc. So you don’t have to spend time on adding these every time you buy, auto-filling saves you the friction.

The less friction the better. For the company.

Let’s add a bit of nuance

In this article, I used extreme or very obvious examples to make a point: e-commerce companies and designers have extensive knowledge of consumer psychology and they know how to use it to their advantage. However, it is important to acknowledge the limitations of my analysis.

1. Not all e-commerce sites use all these tricks to the same extent

Pushy e-comemrce is a spectrum, where Temu and Shein are on one end, representing the extremely pushy and manipulative shopping experience. On the other end there are the brands that are explicitly against overconsumption, so they use much less of these pushy patterns. For example, Asket, FilippaK. And there is many in between, using some pushy techniques, but maybe less often or only 1 or 2 types.

Every site will use some form of persuasion, after all they want to sell their products. The question is how much, how often and how aggressively. For example, compare Filippa K subtle communication about price reduction with Temu’s extremely pushy discount messaging using various forms of scarcity and social proof.

Sadly, as more of these aggressively persuasive online stores there are, the more people get used to that kind of experience and expect the same from other online stores. As one article explains:

The growing popularity of platforms like Shein, Temu, and TikTok Shop among Gen Zers is pushing established players like Amazon to overhaul their shopping experiences to win back shoppers’ attention. Not only is Amazon implementing numerous initiatives — including livestream commerce, a social shopping feature, and a TikTok-like content feed — with the aim of making shopping on its platform more fun, but it’s also planning to launch a budget marketplace to compete directly with the new wave of Chinese ecommerce platforms.

2. Not all these patterns are objectively bad

For example, Buy Now could be useful for a busy parent who hops on Amazon to buy diapers. Their hands are full, baby is crying, of course they want to get the order done as soon as possible. They will appreciate clicking Buy Now instead of Add to Basket, and then filling out all credit card and shipping information, etc.

While I acknowledge that there are situations when these time-saving shortcuts can be helpful, I also want to highlight that that is not the primary purpose and target audience of these frictionless experiences.

What can you do?

Now you have a better understanding of some e-commerce tricks used against critical thinking. But what can you do?

Become a more mindful shopper

I hope that after reading this article you will have an easier time to recognize pushy patterns that try to get you to buy mindlessly. Keep an eye out for these tricks and when you notice them, stop for a minute to do some critical thinking. Ask yourself:

• Do I actually need this item, or am I just buying it because I saw X having it?
• Can I afford this without breaking up into smaller instalments? If not, is it something I want to take loan for? Is it worth it to go into debt for this item?

And finally, try to avoid Buy Now. Instead, add things to your basket, or even on a separate wishlist, and let it marinate for a while. If a day or a week later you don’t even remember you wanted to order X item, it is probably not something you need to spend money on.

Help your friends become mindful shoppers

Share this article with a friend who would benefit from learning about these tricks.

Share your bad experience to raise awareness

I’m sure you have (or you will) come across pushy e-commerce practices. I encourage you to share them on social media, to call companies out and raise awareness about the problem. You can use #kindcommerce or #pushyecommerce, and if you post on LinkedIn please tag me. @Anna Rátkai. (I only have LinkedIn at the moment. No X, no Insta, no TikTok. ). Or if you have a suggestion of a company I should do a deeper analysis on, feel free to send them to me on Linkedin.

Thanks for reading and remember:

Hi I’m Anna 👋 I work with digital design and I’m an expert in designing for mindful consumption. I share insights about consumer psychology, the power of design in influencing decisions, and other fun stuff. If this sounds interesting to you follow me here on Medium or let’s connect on LinkedIn.

How E-Commerce Tricks Us into Mindless Consumption was originally published in The Environment on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Sustainability is justifiably a hot topic that impacts all kinds of businesses, including e-commerce.

• 🛍️ Conscious consumers are ready to pay higher prices to support sustainable brands.
• 🙏 Shareholders increasingly demand climate efforts from companies
• 💰 Companies have to pay million-dollar fines when they forget to follow consumer protection laws in the pursuit of increasing their sales numbers online

To help companies navigate the world of sustainable e-commerce, more and more articles pop up, sharing best practices, examples, and encouraging statistics. While I do love the effort, I often find myself confused by these articles. Because they usually mix general sustainable business advice (eg: build a sustainable brand ethos or produce sustainably) and sustainable online sales specific advice (eg: prevent returns by offering virtual fitting rooms).

Yes, both aspects are important to build an overall sustainable online business but conflating the word e-commerce with online business is confusing.

E-commerce is a distribution channel

Let’s start with some definitions. E-commerce is a distribution channel. It means: trading goods and services online.

This makes an e-commerce business a company that generates revenue from selling products or services online.

In other words, your brand ethos and production supply chain are independent of the channel you decide to distribute your products.

❌ E-commerce ≠ your brand

❌Ecomerce ≠ your product or your production supply chain

✅ E-commerce = selling your goods and services online.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

❌ Sustainable e-commerce ≠ sustainable product

✅ Sustainable e-commerce = selling your goods and services online in a way that minimizes negative environmental and social impact.

In this article we focus on the sales of physical products online.

Design’s role in sustainable e-commerce

Another result of this lax interpretation of sustainable e-commerce is that articles discuss less relevant advice (brand ethos, production) while ignoring areas that are defining elements of e-commerce. For example the actual design of e-commerce websites.

What does a sustainable e-commerce UX and UI look like? 0 of the top 10 articles for the “sustainable e-commerce” keyword search specifically discuss UI or UX practices. Some of them mention UX-adjacent advice like reducing returns by for example “clearly communicate to your customers the environmental consequences of unlimited shopping returns” or “Write thorough and transparent product descriptions”. Yet there is a lack of discussion about what makes a sustainable e-commerce design.

To illustrate what I mean, let’s do a quick thought experiment. If a brand sells the most sustainable products and delivers with the lowest carbon emission, yet uses aggressive pushy design patterns (like Buy now, only one item left in stock messages) to make their users buy more than they need…can we still say it is sustainable e-commerce? Understanding, of course, that overconsumption is one of the leading causes of climate change.

That is why we need to redefine sustainable e-commerce. We need a better model that not only differentiates between production and distribution channel-related sustainability practices but also defines the role of design in sustainable e-commerce. In this article, I propose and explain this new model.

The sustainable e-commerce business model

The model consists of 2 parts.

Part 1: General sustainable business practices: Business practices that make a brand or company considered sustainable. (regardless if they choose to sell their products in physical stores or online)

1. Having a sustainable brand ethos
2. Producing in a sustainable way
3. Offering sustainable services

Part 2: Sustainable e-commerce practices: practices that minimize the negative environmental and social impact of the sales of goods online.

4. Choosing the e-commerce channel(s) responsibly

5. Using sustainable e-commerce design

6. Using green delivery

Adding these two together will make a sustainable e-commerce business

Now let’s talk in detail about each part. With examples!

Part 1: General sustainable business practices

1. Sustainable brand ethos

The brand ethos is the core of your brand that states what you stand for. A sustainable brand ethos is centered around an environmental or social sustainability issue. There is no one perfect way to approach sustainability, and one brand can’t focus on all sustainability issues.

Here are a few examples of sustainable brand ethos:

• Consuming less (environmental sustainability): Asket has the brand ethos: “The Pursuit of Less”. With high-quality and timeless pieces they are working toward a “world with less clutter, less waste” and “a world free of fast consumption.”

• Pollute less (environmental sustainability): Empiresquid Organics say: “We strive to bring you products that won’t pollute your body or the Earth.”
• Exploit less (social sustainability): Tony’s Chocolate is on the mission of “100% exploitation free the norm in chocolate”.

• Waste less (environmental sustainability): Mud Jeans follows a circular business model: “Creating a waste-free world, that’s what we stand for. With closed-loop post-consumer recycled denim, we breathe new life into our jeans, giving them a fresh start and extending their journey.”

2. Sustainable production and supply chain

Companies can live their values by making sure their products are made in an environmentally and socially sustainable way. For example:

• Consume less: Asket focuses on creating high-quality, durable garments to move away from quickly changing trends that necessitate excessive consumption. “We have no seasonal collections or limited drops. We put our entire focus on building a single, permanent collection of uncompromising essentials, one piece at a time. We manufacture exclusively in Europe, source the finest fibres in the world and pride ourselves in delivering the perfect fit for more people with our extended size system”

• Pollut less: Empiresquid Organics focuses on chemical-free, handcrafted products to live by their ethos. “We are a small, family-run business dedicated to bringing you handcrafted, amazingly wholesome, chemical-free bath, body and home products made from all-natural and certified organic ingredients.”
• Exploit less: Tony’s Chocolate is dedicated to responsible chocolate sourcing. “Over the last few years, we’ve been working on Tony’s Chocolonely’s Sourcing Principles for exploitation-free cocoa. At this point, we are confident that it enables cocoa farmers to earn a living income. And that will put an end to forced labor and illegal child labour on cocoa farms in West Africa.”

• Waste less: Mud Jeans produces new garments from old jeans to live by circular principles. “We recycle your worn jeans with love, into new yarn and new fabric, minimizing water usage to create the next generation of denim.”

3. Sustainable services and other business practices

Besides sustainable production and supply chains, companies can offer services and other business practices that align with their sustainability approach.

• Impact transparency: Asket aims to avoid unnecessary consumption, so they give detailed information about the garments to help users make the right decisions.
• Offer leasing instead of buying. Mud Jeans allows their customers to lease instead of buy jeans and take the used pairs back when the lease period is over. This aligns with their pursuit of a circular business.
• Other sustainable practices: offer emission offsetting, repair service, trade-in program, charity donations, etc

To sum it up, there are many different approaches a brand can take to be more environmentally or socially sustainable. The important thing to recognize is that none of these are connected to the distribution channel they will decide to sell their product.

Once a company chooses the e-commerce distribution path, it should make sure that the way it sells online is also environmentally and socially responsible.

Part 2: Sustainable e-commerce practices

4. Sustainable online sales channel(s)

There are many ways to sell products online, eg: building your own webshop to sell directly to customers, using a marketplace like Amazon, or now even through social media (TikTok or Instagram). Various factors influence which channel a brand will choose. For example how to best reach their target group, the type of product, and what is financially feasible, etc.

One factor could be environmental or social sustainability.

As an example, let’s take social media shops. There have been countless complaints that social media platforms are turning into one big consumer fever dream pushing for excessive consumption. (Again, excessive consumption of unnecessary stuff is a very unsustainable behaviour). For you pages prioritize sales content and checkout is so easy it is actually dangerous.

Considering this, you will never see Asket sell on TikTok shop. Or an influencer doing a sponsored Asket haul where you can comment “The Pursuit of Less” to get discount codes. Asket envisions “a world free of fast consumption”, so this kind of mindless e-commerce definitely does not align with their values. Having their own physical and online store to sell directly to customers is aligned with their sustainability approach.

5. Sustainable e-commerce design

The most under-discussed area of sustainable e-commerce. How do we design sustainable e-commerce UX and UI?

There are two ways to work with this: designing e-commerce websites for minimal emissions and energy use (sustainable UX) or designing e-commerce to encourage sustainable user behaviour.

5.1 Designing low-emission sites

If you choose to build your own webshop, now it is time to think about how to reduce the energy usage of your site. Or if you are a designer at a marketplace, like Amazon, or a resale giant like Asos, you can (and should) still consider these practices.

You might have heard the term sustainable UX floating around. It is all about minimising energy use and thus the emission of digital products through design decisions. For example, choosing an energy-efficient color palette, or using fewer pictures and videos to reduce the processing power needed to load a page. We can apply these low-emission principles in e-commerce web design too.

Here is an example, Tangie, from Sandy Dähnert. You can find more low-carbon e-commerce examples on her site, Green the Web.

5.2 Designing for sustainable user behaviour

The goal of e-commerce is to sell products to customers. However as mentioned earlier, excessive consumption of unnecessary stuff is a massive contributor to climate change. So when we think about designing for sustainable user behaviour, we can think about designing for mindful and responsible consumption. We can help the user make thought-through, intentional decisions by for example:

• Inform users about the impact and origins of the product, like Asket does.

• Showing detailed size and fit so they can avoid buying the wrong items. For example, Patagonia adds the model’s height and the size they are wearing so the user can make better decisions. They also have a separate Size guide to provide even more guidance in choosing the right size.

• Allowing users to filter for sustainable options. For example, Boozt has a “Made with care” filter to allow users to find more sustainable products

Another way we can encourage sustainable behaviour is to help users use the products they buy for a long period and dispose of them responsibly after their useful life. For example, Asket adds care instructions to every product. They also have a lifecycle section where they remind users that they can repair their garments, or if they don’t want them any more, they can send them back to the company to take care of them responsibly.

Side note

In this case, Asket offers sustainable services in the form of repair and trade-in programs and these services are reflected in the UI. So in reality the model is not linear as it is depicted but the parts are interconnected and impact each other.

When we design for mindful consumption, what we should be avoiding is using pushy patterns to get users to make quick, impulse purchases. For example:

• Avoid urgency messages. Temu is a notorious pushy pattern user and in this example, they use “Almost sold out” (4 times) and other urgent language like “Lightning deal”, and “ending soon” to trigger impulse actions.

• Avoid overwhelming and confusing discounts. Shein usually presents multiple overlapping discounts which 1) potentially makes it difficult for the user to understand what is discounted at what price 2) get users excited about finding more amazing deals and add more stuff to other baskets thanks to these bargain prices. Again, very intentional design decisions to trigger impulse actions.

6. Green delivery

The environmental impact of delivering products can be massive. Think packaging waste, or resource use and emissions from delivery. That is why companies that sell online should work on reducing their delivery impact by for example:

• Embracing eco-friendly packaging material
• Reducing the amount of packaging material needed
• Optimizing delivery routes
• Green last-mile delivery.
• and more.

Where do you, as a designer, have an impact?

Now that you have the big picture of what a sustainable e-commerce business is, let’s talk a bit about where you can make a difference. As always, the answer is: it depends.

It depends on what design role you are in.

• As a product designer: you probably have the highest impact in designing for sustainable behaviour.
• As a UI or design system designer, you can focus on implementing low-carbon practices.
• Founder or C level: you are in the position to set or influence company strategy and direction. You can work on shaping a sustainable brand ethos or introducing sustainable services.

The point is, that there is something, even if it is the smallest thing, you could do in your current position to help your company be more environmentally and/or socially responsible.

Disclaimers & limitations of the model

As with all models, this is a simplified version of reality. While the parts seem linearly organized in the visualization, in reality, they are interconnected and impact each other. The goal of this model is not to map reality 1:1 but rather to create a shared mental model so we discuss sustainable e-commerce with more nuance.

With that said, I’m more than happy to hear your feedback and iterate on this model.

Hi, I’m Anna, UX researcher, and advocate for mindful consumption by design. I post about this topic semi-regularly on LinkedIn, and I drive Kind Commerce to challenge pushy e-commerce designs. Let’s connect!

(Re)Defining sustainable e-commerce was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Everyday life has become one big consumerism fever dream. We are constantly tempted and pushed to buy stuff we don’t need or even want, by design.

Social media, once a place to connect, now a platform to sell, sell, and sell more. Instead of looking at pictures of your friends’ trip to Greece, you look at influencers promoting the season’s ‘must-have’ products. And what a coincidence, you can immediately buy that product from seamlessly integrated shopping interfaces. No need to think; just buy. The algorithms prioritising sales content and the complementing built-in shopping experiences are carefully designed to make consumption compelling, easy and well… thoughtless.

But you don’t need to use social media to experience pushy shopping experiences. E-commerce in general is designed to provoke mindless, impulse purchases. One-click-by buttons have come about specifically to minimise friction in the checkout process to “leave less time to rethink purchases.” Not to mention the meticulous use of social proof, urgency and other nudges to trigger reactive purchases.

When users are making buying decisions on a whim it is easy to spend more than they can afford. But worry not, buy-now-pay-later is here to save the day! Momentarily cash-strapped customers can now opt for a microloan without leaving the checkout process. Novel financing solutions are designed to facilitate excessive consumption even if it leads to crippling debt.

And finally, we need to mention that the products themselves we are so keen on accumulating are designed to break or go out of style quickly to keep us coming back to buy more or upgrade to the latest versions.

The bottom line is that products, services and experiences are designed to drive or support excessive consumption. This is Consumption Design.

What is Consumption Design?

Consumption Design is a term to encapsulate the power of design in influencing consumer behaviour. It encompasses a broad range of strategies and methods aimed at manipulating what and how much people buy.

Influencing consumption decisions through design is not a new phenomenon. Consumer engineering has existed for over a century, and it is the origin of Consumption Design.

A short intro to consumer engineering

In the 1920s, America faced a problem it had never faced before: overproduction. Factories had become too efficient in producing goods and consumers were too slow or poor to buy them. To solve this conundrum, the leaders of the economy choose to train people to become obedient consumers. In other words: engineer consumers.

“We must shift America from a needs, to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old had been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.” — Paul Mazur, a partner at Lehman Brothers (See source)

If you are wondering, slowing down production to avoid manufacturing excess stuff wasn’t even considered an option. Earnest Elmo Calkins, the father of consumer engineering, argued that slowing down would mean “turning back the page to earlier and more primitive times when people got along with little and made everything last as long as possible.” What a horrid prospect. A clean planet and a slower life…how primitive.

Calkins was also the one who declared consumer engineering as the “new business science” where increased demand is created through artificial obsolescence and marketing:

“Goods fall into two classes, those we use, such as motor cars or safety razors, and those we use up, such as toothpaste and soda biscuits. Consumer engineers must see to it that we use up the kinds of goods we merely use.” — Earnest Elmo Calkins

Consumer engineers had the important task of “creating consumer demand through the appearance of product innovations, new colour variations, creating new applications and finding other ways of “making goods desirable.””

From Consumer Engineering to Consumption Design

During the past 100 years, we realised we can do more than artificial obsolescence and marketing to increase consumption. We have become experts in manipulating decision-making by exploiting psychological insights and mental shortcuts (nudging, urgency, social proof, etc). We mastered optimizing user flows to craft shopping environments that encourage impulse purchases. We have established and normalized more pervasive ways to create desire for non-essential products.

Consumer engineering, with a narrow focus on product design and marketing, has evolved into a more encompassing Consumption Design, that captures a variety of strategies and methods aimed at influencing consumer decisions.

Consumer engineering also had a narrow focus in the sense that it only considered how to increase consumption.

On the other hand, Consumption Design allows us to question the purpose, impact and ethics of influencing purchase decisions. Do we want to design for excessive, mindless consumption, or sustainable, mindful consumption?

Why you should care about Consumption Design

Primarily because you might be a Consumption Designer yourself and you need to understand the impact of your work.

Impact 1: People are fed up with overconsumption

The thing is, people are getting tired of being pushed to consume all the time. I’m talking about your users, the people you are designing for, the people who use your products.

• They complain that it has become too easy to buy stuff they don’t even want thanks to one-click buy buttons and seamless checkouts.
• They are upset that they go broke spending too much because of pushy or gamified shopping experiences.
• They are becoming fed up with influencers shoving useless, low-quality products down their audiences’ throats.

For a user-centred designer, these are clear indicators of user dissatisfaction and pain points. Seeing these, we should ask ourselves: how do we justify the push for excessive consumption when it makes our users distressed and unhappy?

Impact 2: The planet is in shambles

It is not only your direct user who is negatively impacted by all this unnecessary consumption but also the planet. The planet that you live on and that your kids and grandkids are going to live on.

The production and disposal of all the useless cr*p pollutes the planet contributing to climate change and other environmental problems. As conscious designers understanding our responsibility to use design for good, we should ask ourselves: how do we justify the push for excessive consumption when it so obviously harms the planet?

Impact 3: Exploitation along the supply chain

If a T-shirt is $5 in the store, how could the dozens of people who grew the cotton, sewed the t-shirt, packaged and delivered that T-shirt be fairly paid? Nohow. To produce the useless stuff as cheaply as possible (so that the company can maximize profit) people are exploited along the supply chain.

Regardless of which reason resonates with you the most, one thing is clear: designing for excessive consumption is harmful.

The takeaway

We live in a world designed to keep us in the consumption hamster wheel. As designers, we shape and build this world with the decisions we make. That is why it’s crucial that we recognise our impact and change course as soon as possible.

We need to start championing designing for mindful and sustainable consumption. Either by challenging practices at companies that design for excessive consumption or by choosing to use our skills and knowledge at companies that are already on the mission of sustainable consumption.

“Consumer culture had to be invented; designers helped invent it. If that’s the case, then we can invent something better. We don’t have a choice. As designers, we don’t have to wait. […] Instead of imagining how to make a better widget, we should be dreaming about remaking our willfully ignorant acceptance of consumer culture.” — Cliff Kuang — Designers helped get us into the climate crisis. Can they help get us out?

What now?

Please share this article with a friend or colleague! We need to raise awareness and start a discussion to ignite change and start designing for mindful and sustainable consumption. If you have ever been frustrated by mindless overconsumption, help spread the word about Consumption Desing.

Hi, I’m Anna, UX researcher, and advocate for mindful consumption by design. I post about this topic semi-regularly on LinkedIn if you want to follow, and I drive Kind Commerce to challenge pushy e-commerce designs.

Are you a Consumption Designer? was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As you arrive at an ultrafast fashion brand’s landing page, it’s an immediate visual assault. Everything is flashing, moving, popping up, in bright colors. And of course, everything is on sale.

Since ultrafast fashion companies (like Shein and Fashion Nova) offer dirt cheap, throw-away clothing, they need to sell massive amounts to turn a profit. They rely on users buying impulsively, filling their carts with unplanned purchases.

They use overwhelming and confusing discounting strategies purposefully to maximize impulse purchases. Let’s look at 5 psychological principles (priming, confusion, overwhelm, dopamine and urgency) behind this technique to understand why it is so prevalent in current e-commerce design.

PRIMING

When the user arrives at the landing page and the only thing they see is discount upon discount and prices scraping the floor, it primes them to think that this brand only offers the deals. Everything is a find here, every piece added to the cart is value for money. Technically saving money with every purchase.

This framing makes it easier for the user to justify adding things to their basket that they don’t even need or originally did not intend to buy.

CONFUSION

Everything is 50%, then the same everything is 40%, then again, everything is 30% off on Fashion Nova’s website….so what exactly is discounted at what rate? Do these discounts add up?

• 120% discount…does that mean Fashion Nova will pay the user to get the items?
• Or does this mean the user is only paying 21% of the item (50% off, then 40% off that and then 30% off that)

Clearly neither. If you look closer, Fashion Nova does say which categories the discount is for. But it is no accident that “40% OFF EVERYTHING” is bolded, highlighted with yellow and centred in the middle of the picture exactly where the model is.

They know how people read these visuals: eyes are drawn to the main element of the picture (the model) and the bold, yellow letters grab the attention. It is likely that the user scrolls past the text on the top.

Someone made the deliberate design decision not to make it easy for the user to understand what the discount is for.

If they wanted to be clear and straightforward, they could have done this:

Or to make it even clearer, like this:

And to strengthen my case even further, here is another example of their deliberately confusing discounts. Buy one free, get one free…what do you even mean?

So, how does this lead to excessive shopping?

When there are so many, seemingly overlapping, discounts, plus additional coupon codes to get yet another % off at the end, it is difficult to keep track of what costs how much and predict the final price while shopping. Throwing everything into the basket and seeing the total at the end is easier. Of course, the chances of buying something impulsively increase once it is in the basket.

OVERWHELMING

On top of the already confusing and misleading information display, everything is moving, blinking, and popping up. A dozen things are trying to grab the user’s attention at the same time.

Again, deliberate design decisions. All this could have easily been static, but overwhelming the user is a feature, not a bug.

As long as the user’s mental capacity is taken up by making sense of the available deals and absorbing the visual assault, there is less mental capacity left to think through purchase decisions. This intentionally overwhelming experience distracts users from asking questions like “Do I actually need this thing?” and intends to put them on shopping autopilot.

DOPAMINE EFFECT

We love a good bargain hunt. One article explains:

Entering a favourite store or logging onto your favourite shopping website is the catalyst. This very action tells your body that it should start producing greater amounts of dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain that makes it feel good to keep shopping and searching for pleasure and rewards. […]Shopping “is kind of like a treasure hunt,” he says. “The search itself is highly motivating.

Bargain hunting keeps us on our toes, we never know when we are going to find the next amazing deal. So we keep scrolling, keep clicking on items, fuelled by the thrill that the next item might be the best deal. And of course, impulsively buying that deal is also part of the journey.

URGENCY

Obviously, discounts are temporary so whenever there is something on sale, it immediately creates a sense of urgency: we have to take advantage of this deal before it’s too late. We don’t want to miss out on buying a T-shirt we will never wear for $5 instead of $10!

This feeling of urgency multiplies when there is a countdown clock involved.

AND THE DISCOUNTS ARE NOT EVEN REAL

These discounts are not only deceptive because they intentionally exploit mental shortcuts and trick users’ brains into impulse buying things, but also because they are presumably fake. If all these discounts were “real”, it would mean these companies are losing money since they don’t sell almost anything at their intended full price. Yet, ultrafast fashion brands are thriving. Just look at Fashion Nova’s CEO buying one of the world’s most expensive houses for 141 million. Clearly, discounts are not hurting these brands’ bottom line. These are the exact prices they want to sell the items on disguised as generous discounts and the deals of a lifetime.

Nevertheless, the psychological impacts of aggressive discounting still work and many users fall victim to those.

THE BIGGER PICTURE — the environment and user’s well-being

For a sustainable future and a balanced life, where our primary goal is not to outconsume our insta friends, our relationship to material consumption needs to change. We need to buy less.

As designers, we must use our influence for a positive impact. We need to be at the forefront of facilitating and advocating for mindful consumption. For the planet and the sake of our users.

We must stop designing for excessive consumption and start designing for mindful consumption. This means removing persuasive and deceptive designs like those listed above and giving the users time and space to make thought-through decisions.

We have a choice! Even fast fashion doesn’t have to be so aggressive about discounts as demonstrated by other fast fashion brands.

Alternative to aggressive discounting

For example, Weekday, which is still a fast fashion brand being part of H&M group, only shows 2 discounts on its landing page and the “deals” section in the menu is not even highlighted in any way.

Or Arket, which is technically still fast fashion as it belongs to H&M but branded as catering to slow lifestyle, does not even mention discounts on their landing page. What’s more interesting is that the language of discount is also not straightforward. In the menu, there is an item called “Previous Collection” which only implies lower prices since items are from last season. Plus the red colour is also a hint to the discounted prices.

IN CONCLUSION

The current way of designing for excessive consumption is unsustainable and unethical. As designers, we need to recognize our impact on the planet and the user and start designing for mindful consumption. And just by being less aggressive with discounts, we are taking steps in the right direction.

Hi, I’m Anna, UX Researcher by profession and advocate of mindful consumption by design by passion. I drive the concept of Kind Commerce to raise awareness about the rarely discussed topic of design’s role in encouraging excessive consumption. You can follow me on LinkedIn for shorter blurbs about this topic, on YouTube for more consumer-facing content, or on Substack for other interesting bits and pieces about design, business and sustainability. Let’s make the world a little better together!

The psychology of deceptive discounting in UX was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We can glorify e-commerce personalization as a wonderful way to build strong and long-lasting relationships with customers, but if we care to put it bluntly: personalization is just another tool for companies to sell more by optimizing recommendations and experience. In a world edging closer to ecological collapse thanks to excessive and unnecessary consumption, it is overdue to ask ourselves: what are we doing using design influence and tools, like personalization, to encourage customers to buy crap they don’t need?

In this article, I invite you to think critically about personalized e-commerce experiences.

I love getting random, crappy recommendations

I get the most random crap recommended to me when I shop online. The other day I added a jumper to my cart on Shein (of course, for research purposes, no shopping from Shein or Temu in this household), and I got recommended more jumpers…pants, so far so good… these weird plastic socks, that I never understood why people wear, just by looking at them makes my foot stinky…a foot warmer thingy, huh?…and a toy telescope with flashlight, what is that even?

I’m personally not offended when I get crappy recommendations, because

1. I’m happy I’m not tempted to add more things to my order, you know trying to keep my consumption minimal, climate crisis, environmental impact and stuff.
2. I’m happy that Shein doesn’t have enough information about me to recommend things I might actually like.

But I seem to be in the minority with this perspective.

Consumers want, indeed expect and crave personalization

“Consumers today expect personalized experiences across all digital touchpoints” (source)

“The question isn’t whether shoppers want personalization. It’s very clear that they crave it.” (source)

There are even some numbers supporting these bold claims:

• 66% of consumers share that coming across content that isn’t personalized would deter them from purchasing. (source)
• 91% of consumers say they are more likely to shop with brands that provide offers and recommendations that are relevant to them. (source)
• 56% of customers are more likely to return to an e-commerce site that offers product recommendations, while 74% of customers feel frustrated when website content is not personalized. (source)
• Gartner found that customers who find company emails irrelevant and annoying “unsubscribe” (48%) or “stop doing business” with that brand (14%). Ouch…

After reading all this, it seems like customers want companies to take their personal data and use it to target them with more things they could buy.

But why is that?

Why are customers ready to give up their personal data in exchange for tailored recommendations and shopping experiences?

Most of us probably think about it as a compromise. I’m going to let this site/company use my data so in return I get the benefit of:

• Saving time and effort. There is so much stuff to buy. Like sooo much. Finding the one thing that you are actually looking for can take ages and drain you mentally. Of course, lifting off the weight of the search through recommendations, search results, and offers tailored to your taste, will make your life easier.
• Feeling valued and understood. Despite all the screens and AI we live with, we are still humans craving connection and recognition. We want others to notice and appreciate us. So when massive companies send us tailored communication with our name highlighted, recommending products we actually like, we happily take that on the surface level and thank them for understanding us so well. We might even forget that in reality, we are just a number in their CRM system, where all this personalized content is automated, just so they can sell more to us.

And there are some people, like me, who are not ready to give up their data in exchange for convenience and recognition, but it is taken anyway. Without asking, or through deceptive cookie policies.

As one article put it: “Is there any worse feeling as a consumer than being marketed to with personal information you didn’t freely provide to a company? It’s an awkward way to learn that a brand is hunting down your personal data, and it doesn’t help build a trustworthy relationship.”

No, it does not.

Dear massive corporation, please don’t stalk me!

We need to talk about the personalization-privacy paradox

Apparently, for personalization to work, “you need a deep understanding of [your users’] interests, behaviour, and preferences.” (source).

Am I the only one reading this and screaming “No thank you!”?

Dear massive corporation, please do not understand my interests, behaviour and preferences so you can exploit them for profit.

But it gets worse. Some companies argue that “in the hypercompetitive world of personalization, this surface-level data is not enough. Enhancing your customer’s profile will require you to collect relevant data about how your customer interacts with your brand on all channels, what motivates them to purchase and what makes them tick ...”

Hmm..doesn’t this sound a little dystopian? Corporations understanding my essence to make me consume more!? Sadly it has been happening for decades and the technology to collect and use this data is just getting better.

I feel the more pervasive the data collection is, the more desensitised we are to it. Like when we are furious that companies can detect when someone is pregnant by crawling through their data, who cares if they collect our location without asking? It seems insignificant in comparison, yet it is not.

Not all data is created equal. According to 2022 Statista data, “80 per cent of responding consumers believed that it was appropriate for marketers to collect the brand purchase history of their clients.”

However, less than half of respondents thought it was appropriate to collect data on a user’s important life events.

A Gartner report found that 57% of consumers say they will unsubscribe, and 38% will stop doing business with a brand in response to perceived creepiness. Customers are ready to “punish brands if their excessive use of data points makes the personalization so detailed as to appear downright creepy or invasive.”

So it seems users are ready to share SOME of the data about themselves to get the benefit of saving time and feeling understood, but is it also clear that they are SENSITIVE about which and how much personal data brands use in their personalization efforts.

More importantly, customers want to BE IN CONTROL of what data is collected and how it is used to personalize their experiences. (source)

Data is also expensive

“Our ability to gather data far outpaced the ability to make sense of it” (source).

As a Gartner report highlights, “In recent years, e-commerce brands have become data collection powerhouses. The only problem is that massive volumes of data remain disorganized and inaccurate.” In the picture you can see that only a fraction of the companies that collect data actually use it.

Not to mention that the more data you collect, the more liability you invite on the company. Luckily today we have laws and regulations in place to keep companies accountable for safeguarding customer information. “In the age of increasing breaches, you really want to minimize the risk and liabilities that can lead to massive financial cost.” (source)

On top of this, storing data, especially when it just sits unorganized on a server, has a high cost. Both financially 💸 (paying for storage) and environmentally 🌱 (read more about the environmental impact of servers and data storage here).

Personalization is a key business move in today’s cutthroat competition.

“Companies that fail to offer unique, tailored experiences that foster customer engagement and develop brand loyalty will fall behind.” (source)

“And quite frankly, this [extreme] level of personalization is what’s necessary to succeed in the e-commerce market today.” (source)

In today’s cutthroat market competition, a massive amount of companies are fighting for the same set of customers’ money. To get customers to buy from them instead of a competitor, companies have to show something exceptional. According to a Shopify article: “Personalization is the key to stand out on the market.”

And why do companies want to stand out in the market? To earn more money, that’s right!

• “[Personalization] drives sales, increases conversion and gets [the users] to come back for more.” (source)
• “[Personalization] improves satisfaction and engagement, leading to higher conversion rates and lower abandonment.” (source)
• “Personalization leads to higher average order value: Personalized product recommendations can help cross-sell and upsell complementary or higher-value items.” (source)
• “By receiving this consistent level of personalization across all channels, consumers will be inclined to purchase more and to purchase again from the same brand that made them feel seen and heard.”
• “eCommerce personalization is like having a savvy shop assistant who knows just what you’re after. It jazzes up the shopping journey, making it tailor-fit for each user, which means more sales and fewer abandoned carts.”

Let me put this plainly: eCommerce personalization is just another tool to drive excessive consumption so that companies earn more money.

What exactly is wrong with getting users to buy more through personalization?

If you think like business, you likely rejoice at having personalization as a super-weapon to sell more. Selling more in the current economic system is good…the best that can happen to a business. More often than not, selling more is the only metric that matters to a company.

In the meanwhile the planet is turning into a dumpsterfire 🔥 because of our excessive consumption of things we don’t need and don’t even bring value to our lives. Keeping this level of material consumption is taking us towards an unlivable climate and environment.

Not everyone working with e-commerce connects the dots between selling stuff and that stuff’s actual environmental impact. Or maybe they do and just conveniently ignore it so they can keep working for companies like Shein and still sleep well at night.

Part of the problem is that as designers we are not thinking about our design decision in the big picture. We are great at focusing on local impact like “we helped our user to find more things to buy and reduced the number of clicks to complete the purchase”, yey for convenience. We might add “we also helped decrease cart abandonment rate”, yey for revenue. Job well done!

Oh wait a minute…we forgot to mention that 90% of the things we sell end up in the landfill after a week because they are completely useless, a fad, or just fall apart.

As designers understanding that our design decisions have a widespread and manyfold impact in the “real world”, we must realize: when our planet is devastated by excessive consumption, we simply can’t use our influence and design tools to push for more mindless shopping.

It is time for e-commerce design to evolve from pushing excess and impulse purchases to supporting intentional and thought-through buying decisions.

Now the question is: how can e-commerce personalization be a part of that?

Personalization is a double-edged sword

Now that we have a good understanding of how personalization can be a means for excessive consumption, it is time to be a bit more nuanced.

Personalization is not all bad, it can indeed be an aid in being more mindful consumers. For example, when we serve exactly what the user is looking for in the recommendations, we can help them avoid purchasing the “wrong” thing(s). This reduces unnecessary purchases and is ultimately good for the business too, since we can cut down on the cost of handling returns.

Of course, we can’t escape the system our business operates in. The e-commerce businesses we work for make money by selling stuff. So however much I would like personalization to be purely about “being nice to the user and helping them buy intentionally”, it won’t be. The underlying goal is always profit, yet I believe there is a difference between:

1. Using personalized cross and upsell recommendations to encourage impulse purchases and squeeze the maximum amount of money out of our visitors. or
2. Using personalization to build long-term relationships with our customers based on trust so they are going to come back to do business with us

Can you guess which one is the more (environmentally) sustainable approach?

Here is how we could think about personalization in a more environmentally sustainable way

If using personalization to push impulsive, excessive consumption is an unsustainable approach, we want to move towards the opposite: using it to help mindful, intentional consumption.

Instead of going for a short-term spike in sales, let’s focus on nurturing long-term connections and thus increase lifetime value.

We align our personalization strategy to achieve this by using it to

• Build trust
• Recognize the user
• Provide value

Building trust means user control and transparency over data collection and use

Here are some ideas on how to achieve this:

1.Use zero-party data above everything else
Zero-party data is data that a customer intentionally and proactively shares with a business. It can be collected through questionnaires or forms where the user purposefully discloses preferences, purchase intentions, personal contexts, and how they want to be recognized by the brand. “The real value in zero-party data comes from your customers’ intent to give it to you. First-, second- and third-party data are not freely given by the customer and it matters when data privacy concerns are at an all-time high.” (source)

2. Make data collection opt-in
If you want to use other than zero-party data, let users choose and agree on what data is collected about them.

• First-party data, eg. location, browsing behaviour, purchase information/history, cart abandonment behaviour.
• Third-party data: forget about this. It is a mish-mash of unrelated data from unreliable sources, it has no direct relationship with the user and it quickly becomes outdated. Just don’t.

3. Disclose benefits clearly
If you want users to opt into sharing their data, tell them why they should. What is the benefit they are getting from sharing their browsing history?

4. Collect only the data you need
Be strategic about what data you need to collect (again, based on your personalization goal) from the get-go and collect only those.

TO SUM IT UP

• Personalization is a tool, and like all tools, its impact can be positive or negative depending on the outcome we want to achieve. As long as the personalization goal is “get users to buy more” in the middle of a climate crisis…we have a problem.
• I understand why personalization is important. It is a way to provide value to the user and stand out in the market. But isn’t it better to stand out in the market by being kind and transparent with the user as opposed to just exploiting them as most of your competitors do?
• Designers working with e-commerce need to understand the impact of their design decisions in the real world. On the brim of an ecological collapse, using design influence to get users to buy more, buy mindlessly is unethical to say the least.

Final thoughts

If you are working in eCommerce now you might be pulling your hair, or just smiling dismissively: she has noooo idea what she is talking about. Designing for reduced consumption…never going to happen.

And you know what, that’s okay. I know I have a wild idea, advocating for supporting mindful consumption in a world built on consumerism and perpetual growth. I’m well aware that there is a whole industry focused on optimizing shopping experiences to the last pixel to turn the maximum profit.

Yet, I feel there needs to be a discussion. We can’t blindly accept a dysfunctional status quo and design our way into collapse.

So please share your thoughts, I’d love to hear what you think.

Hi, I’m Anna and I drive Kind Commerce. I write and talk about the intersection of design, consumerism and sustainability, so if these topics sound interesting, let’s connect on LinkedIn or subscribe to my newsletter.

E-commerce personalization: helping users or exploiting their personal data? was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Let’s face it: tech needs to change.

We have a myriad of problems in the digital space that affect society and the planet negatively: invasive personal data collection and trading, deceptive and weaponized AI that also uses a gargantuan amount of energy, spreading of propaganda and misinformation, addictive social media design, e-commerce design that encourages excessive consumption, e-waste, and the list goes on.

These problems are obviously big and hairy, but there is usually a strong commercial or business interest that fuels them:

• Facebook uses addictive design and shows you triggering content to glue your eyeballs to the screen. The more time you spend in the app, the more money they earn from ads.

“Whatever you think of Facebook’s and Twitter’s leadership, they surely didn’t set out to create a strategy to sow discord and polarize people. But they did instruct managers to maximize the platforms’ growth and revenues, and the algorithms they devised to do just that brilliantly succeeded — with alarming consequences.” — Harvard Business Review

• Apple launches shiny new iPhones every year to “spurr enough people to upgrade”. “Old”, but perfectly functioning, phones get tossed onto the growing pile of 54 million tonnes of e-waste
• Temu applies persuasive design in their e-commerce experience to encourage excessive consumption of unnecessary stuff, regardless of the environmental footprint.

Companies must change their products, practices, and sometimes even their business models for a healthy, equitable, and sustainable future. But why would they do that?

Companies exist to make profit

The one thing we need to know about a business: it exists to make profit.

Since profit comes from selling products and services (from now on I’m just gonna use “products”), companies need to offer something people are willing to use or pay for.

And therein lies the motivation to change: companies are willing to alter their products if they realize that they can sell more (≈ earn more money) after the changes.

Companies pick up signals from what is happening around them to decide their next move. There are 7 signals that can especially influence business decisions and thus drive positive change in tech.

Let’s take a look at these 7 drivers of change.

1) Consumer demand

Companies need people (or other companies if it is a B2B) that buy or use their product, otherwise, they won’t be able to make money.

That is why market research is such a big part of product development. Companies want to align their offering to what consumers say they want. The other side of the coin is of course the actual sales (or usage) numbers that show what consumers are buying and using in reality. If they notice that a product doesn’t bring enough money, it is time to reconsider things.

Why do you think Apple is launching “carbon neutral” watches? Because they understand that environmental sustainability is becoming an important part of decision-making for their consumers. Simply put: they can reach a wider audience (sell more watches) if they claim their products to be a more sustainable version.

2) Competition

If a business doesn’t pick up the signals on an unmet need, chances are soon there will be a new player on the market fulfilling that need.

Take Fairphone as an example. Bas van Abel realized the unmet need (ie: consumer demand) for ethical and reparable smartphones way before Apple did. He founded Fairphone which now has an influence on the industry. Fairphone’s presence and growth (76% more devices sold in 2020 than in 2019) show the increasing demand for sustainable electronics.

Which not even Apple can ignore any longer, hence the ‘carbon neutral’ products. And do you remember Apple’s efforts to make the iPhone 14 easy to repair? If there was no Fairphone pushing the boundaries on how easy it can be to repair your phone, creating new standards and consumer demand, arguably there would be no repairable iPhone either.

3) Employee demand

Companies need talented and dedicated designers like you to build great products. If no designer is willing to work on an ethically questionable or unsustainable product, the company won’t have a product to sell. (Or they ask the engineers to do the “design”…good luck selling that!)

There are two ways a company can notice signals from employees.

The first one is the lack of skilled and dedicated employees. For example when a company puts out a job ad and there is no decent designer who wants to take the job, or when valuable employees leave the company because of unethical or unsustainable practices. Not being able to attract and retain talent is a big 🚩 for the company that they should recognize as a signal for a necessary change.

The second one is when employees internally express their demands or disagreement with how thighs currently are.

Take Tristan Harris as an example. He worked at Google when he realized the harmful impact of Google’s attention engineering efforts (think constant email notifications on your phone to grab your attention and pull you into your Gmail account). One day in 2013 he sent out a 141 slide PowerPoint “A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention”. It resonated with others at the company so no surprise it went viral.

“The slides were often referred to by employees fighting internal battles over features designed to maximize user attention, former employees said.”

Google had no choice but to recognize the employees’ demand for more ethical tech. Years after Tristan’s slides, Google launched wellbeing.google where they encourage users to “Unplug more often” and “Minimize Distractions”. Would they have done this without Tristan's slide deck and thousands of employees fighting the uphill battle for ethical tech? Doubtful.

4) Industry professionals demand

As a designer working in the trenches of the tech industry, you have the opportunity to notice cracks before anyone else and voice your concerns to the whole industry.

Continuing with Tristan’s story, let’s see how he took tech ethics from Google to the whole industry. After he left Google, he (together with others) founded the Center For Humain Tech, which does amazing work around increasing awareness and education about tech ethics industry-wide. They even released an entertaining yet alarming documentary (The Social Dilemma) on Netflix that reached millions of people and educated them about the dangers of social media. Thanks to this, consumer demand for ethical tech is growing, which in turn gives space for companies that offer easy and comprehensive personal data protection solutions (like Aura). And of course legislation around personal data like GDPR. See…everything is connected (hence all the arrows in the chart).

Another example of the power of a designer in igniting positive change is Deceptive Patterns. Manipulating user behavior and decisions has never been ethical, but we didn’t pay much attention (or didn’t know how to handle it) before Harry Bignull published Dark Patterns (now Deceptive Patterns). He did a tremendous favor to the whole industry by naming and structuring these patterns. His work inspired others to care about and fight against Deceptive Patterns. As an industry (or design community) we now demand companies to not use Deceptive Patterns and call out the ones that do. And thanks to all this collective effort, the application of Deceptive Patterns is now prohibited by law in some countries.

This brings us to the next driver of change…

5 ) & 6) Citizen demand and regulations

Companies must obey laws and regulations to legally sell their products.

I mentioned GDPR and Dark Pattern regulations already and here is another one: Apple now must sell their phones with USB-C charger instead of their proprietary “Lightning” cables thanks to an EU Law. This law of course aims to reduce e-waste.

“$312 million (250 million euros). That’s how much money is wasted every year on unnecessary charger purchases in the EU, according to the European Council. There is also around 11,000 tonnes of waste produced every year from unused or thrown away chargers and cables.”

In Western democracies, laws and regulations are developed (or influenced) by the officials we elect to represent us. So as citizens who want to see change, we can vote for officials whose agenda aligns with ours or we can voice our concerns in letters or emails directed to elected officials, in public forums, etc.

7) Investor demand

Companies need investor money to grow, innovate, experiment, and sometimes just to stay afloat.

For example, Fairphone was founded in 2014 but the first year they turned profit was 2020. During those early 6 years, they needed investor money to finance their operations. People and companies that believed in Fairphone's mission of producing a sustainable smartphone, loaned their money to the company.

As the demand for sustainable and ethical products is growing, investors are more and more going to support companies that respond to these demands.

“ Investors want to invest in companies that have a future. So if a company does not have those bold [sustainabiliyt] commitments and show that they’re executing on them, then investors will take their money elsewhere.”

So there you have it, 7 drivers of positive change in the tech industry with real-life examples.

Of course, this is a simplified version of the reality. Economics, business, politics, and human behavior are more complex than I can fit in a sensible chart. So before you get the illusion that if you stop using Facebook Mark will immediately change their business model to something less exploitative, I would like you to keep three things in mind:

Change happens because we demand it together

One person alone won’t be able to change a whole business or a system. Yet taking individual action is crucial to ignite positive change.

Using the Google example again: Tristan was the first one who took action (alone) and then thousands of designers joined him to fight the battle. Those were all individuals taking action separately but added together, they sent a strong signal to Google: we want change.

The more of us use our actions and voice, be it as a consumer, an employee or an investor, to signal the change we want to see, the less a company can ignore the demand.

Change happens because we demand it consistently

Those Google designers didn’t just once pull up the deck and made their case. They argued for ethical design meeting after meeting until they saw results.

In order to make change happen, we need to be consistent, persistent, and continue taking action.

Change doesn’t happen overnight

Tristan shared the slide deck at Google in 2013 and wellbeing.google launched in 2018. Not a quick turnaround, but it is a trunaround. Change might happen slowly or gradually, but it happening. Because we demand it together consistently.

What you can do today

I mentioned “use our actions to signal the need for change” earlier, so I wanted to give you some ideas about what actions you can take using the 7 drivers framework to signal the change you want to see:

As a consumer

• As a consumer, you vote with your money. The more money you spend with a company, the more you support them. So cast your vote and buy from companies that align with your values.
• Sometimes you support a company with your time and attention. (think Facebook: free-to-use product but they make more money the more time you spend in the app). So in this sense, you can vote with your time and attention. Spend these limited resources on products that align with your values.

As an employee

• Work for a company that you believe in and can stand behind its values.
• Or work for a company that doesn’t align with your values and ignite the change from the inside.

As an industry professional

• Choose an issue and be vocal about it. Bring it up with colleagues, go to meetups, and share content about it on your platforms. If you have the ambition, time, and energy: speak about it at conferences, write a book, create your own content, etc. Or you can always support others already fighting the battle by sharing their content, supporting them on Patreon, buying their book, etc.

As a citizen

• Vote for politicians whose agenda and values are aligned with yours.
• Express your demands: send an email or letter to your elected official, speak up on public forums, etc.

As an investor

• If you invest in the stock market, buy stocks from companies you believe in, or choose funds with a sustainability focus

What change can you fight for?

We have established that there is a lot that needs to change in tech. But we all have limited time and energy, so simply don’t have the bandwidth to pick up fights on all the fronts. And we are naturally more interested in some things than others.

To help you choose a battle (if you don’t have one yet), here is a list of problems in tech that need to be addressed and resources where you can get started. (I’m sure there is more, leave your suggestions in the comments, I would love to expand this list!)

• Energy consumption of digital products, data and AI — Gerry McGovern webpage and LinkedIn
• End of life of digital product — Joe McLedon’s And Ends website and Endineering course
• Sustainable UX — The Sustainable UX Network, Sandy Dähnert — Green The Web
• Sustainable Web Design + books from Tim Frick and Tom Greensburg
• Sustainable e-commerce design: Me, this is my passion topic, here is my first article
• Deceptive Patterns — Harry Bignull
• Tech Ethics: Center for Humain Tech, Your Undivided Attention (podcast
• E-waste
• Accessibility
• All the AI problems
• Inclusive design
• And a lot more. Leave suggestions in the comments

Closing thoughts:

Often it seems impossible to ignite or demand the change we want to see. Companies are big and powerful machines and we are just one speck. Even if we manage to get in between two cogs, we have way too little impact to halt the grind… let alone the whole system.

But I hope this article shows you that even though you are just one speck, together with many other specks we are a pile. And when a pile gets into a fine-tuned machine, it’s trouble!

Your individual action counts, even if it is hard (or impossible) to measure. So keep at it, and fight your battles because through your actions you are building a better tomorrow.

“A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” — Margaret Mead

What could possibly drive positive change in the tech industry? was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

E-commerce websites use messages like “Only one left in stock, hurry!” and other persuasive design techniques for one sole purpose: to get the user to buy more. While there have been many articles written about how these techniques serve the business (aka more sales), the discussion around the detrimental impact on the user and the environment is non-existent. Until now.

E-commerce is all about sales, baby!

The success of an e-commerce store comes down to one thing: how much it sells. Just look at the sales-focused key performance indicators (KPIs) that are used to measure the success of an e-commerce site: average order value, cart abandonment rate, sales conversion, etc.

Increasing the amount of money a user spends and decreasing the chance they are leaving empty-handed is the ultimate goal. The whole company works in unison to make that happen. Including UX.

Part of a UX designer’s job is to contribute to achieving the KPIs. The designer is expected to deliver designs that will increase the average order value and decrease cart abandonment rate. In other words, use design tools to get the user to buy more.

One of these tools is persuasive design.

Persuading the user to buy more

Persuasive design uses psychology and behavioral insights to influence the user’s behavior and decisions. The goal is to elicit the behavior desired by the persuader. Here is an example:

“Social proof is a technique to get people to buy a particular product or buy more. As marketers have come to learn about how strong a persuasive power social proof has on consumer behavior, they ensure to make their consumers believe that other people also purchase and like their product. “

Social proof is just one example, but we can think about personalization, urgency, framing, and recommendations as persuasive design tools. I’m working on a comprehensive overview of these techniques and until I can link to that I recommend reading the paper titled: Persuasive Systems Design: Key Issues, Process Model, and System Features (Oinas-Kukkonen and Harjumaa, 2009) to better understand the taxonomy of persuasive design.

The bottom line is: we have meaningful knowledge about human behavior and psychology we can apply in our designs to “encourage” our users to buy more. And while the business might be happy to see the average order value going up, there are other aspects to this that we rarely think about.

Persuasion encourages excessive consumption

Since we are encouraging our users to buy more, buy bigger, buy newer…Buy things they don’t even want or need in the first place, we can safely say that persuasive UX design encourages excessive and unnecessary consumption.

I want to emphasize when I say excessive consumption I mean the consumption of meaningless stuff that doesn’t bring value to our lives. Think Temu the home of chicken-shaped lamps and toilet paper holders in the shape of a smiling velociraptor. Think Shein where you can buy any fashion fad for so cheap that it feels okay to throwaway them away after one use. Think Flying Tiger, the equivalent of if Temu had a physical store: useless trinkets and knickknacks for literally no money.

Excessive consumption is destroying the planet

Excessive consumption is one of the leading causes of environmental degradation and climate change. We take our limited natural resources to produce all the stuff we don’t need, just to send them to the landfill in a short while. Polluting and destroying the environment during production and disposal of course.

The more we consume, the more we contribute to the already devastating environmental situation.

Consequently, the more we encourage unnecessary and excessive consumption, the more we contribute to the already devastating environmental situation.

If this revelation about the environmental impact of persuasive design didn’t make you interested in reconsidering their usage, there is another perspective that might. Something we designers say we care about the most: the user.

Persuasive design is detrimental to the user too

Luckily there is a recent (2022) OECD paper detailing the negative impact of e-commerce persuasion on users, so I’m just going to lift the key points here.

1. Persuasion might compromise user autonomy since the choice architecture and visual presentation of options can “lead consumers to make choices they may not otherwise have made”. Users usually have the illusion of control, when in reality there is an arsenal of tools applied throughout the entire shopping experience to influence their decisions.
2. Financial loss since these persuasive patterns aim “getting consumers to buy something that they may not have needed or to spend more than they may have otherwise intended.”
3. Negative emotions since the user can feel frustration, shame, or guilt for being tricked or manipulated.
4. Cognitive burden as the user has to exercise extreme willpower and concentration in order to make sensible decisions.

So your users would also be better off if they were not constantly persuaded to BUY MORE.

Let’s sum this up shall we: persuasive design in e-commerce increases sales (yey for the business), while it contributes to environmental problems and negative user sentiments.

We should care about this because…

E-commerce is a growing business: ~20% of the world's retail sales are now online, equating to $6 trillion in sales in 2022. The projection is that this spending is going to grow to ~$8 trillion by 2026. Today 2.5 billion people shop online, but it will be closer to 3 billion by 2025.

Big numbers but the bottom line is: we shop so much online and it is only going to grow in the future. And apparently, persuasive design is responsible for a big chunk of this online shopping:

• Using FOMO (urgency or scarcity principles) can boost conversions by 40%-200%. (source)
• Online product reviews (social proof) about a specific product can increase conversion rates by 270%.
• A study shows that 18 to 28-year-olds were 65% more likely to spend more than intended owing to persuasive patterns (OECD report).

E-commerce is a significant part of life and economy and it is here to say. But for the sake of a liveable future, we must change how we design it.

As responsible designers, we need to recognize that we have an overconsumption problem. That our work is the enabler and accelerator of unsustainable user behavior. In the middle of an environmental crisis, we can’t design for unsustainable behavior.

As long as we only look at design decisions through a user-centered lens it is easy to overlook the wider, indirect impact of our designs.

When feel the world burning around us (literally) it is a good indication that it is time to start not to ignore the problems we are part of creating.

What do we do?

We come together and demand change! We say no to using persuasive design in online shopping experiences, and we call out companies that still do. We talk to fellow designers about the problem and engage top voices in the design community to raise awareness.

As I said before, discussion and awareness about this particular problem is non-existent. I’m working on filling this gap, and in the meantime, I would love to connect with you who got ideas and motivation to change things after this article. Let’s connect on LinkedIn.

Just to finish the article on a positive note, here is a rough outline of the concept I’m working on:

Kind Commerce

Kind Commerce is a persuasion-free online shopping experience where we give users the space and opportunities to make mindful purchase decisions. We don’t compromise usability, findability, or aesthetics, but we refuse to nudge for excessive consumption.

It’s kind to our users and our planet.

I’m working on all kinds of resources (articles, manifesto, practical guides, examples etc.) that I’m going to release as they get ready.

So keep an eye out and share this article to help get the ball rolling!

The negative impact of persuasive design was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As you might have heard, humanity has a lot on its plate recently: we are in the middle of a climate crisis, our oceans are turning into plastic landfills, animal species are going extinct by the dozens every day, and just in general we are destroying the very thing that keeps us alive, the planet. Amidst these existence-threatening circumstances, our aim should be to reduce (or rather stop) the activities that put us in this situation in the first place. We should be working on reducing resource use, energy consumption, emission of toxic chemicals, and waste creation. And yet, business goes on as usual, companies producing more stuff, extracting more fossil fuels, creating more waste day by day.

As digital designers, we have our part in this. We keep churning out new apps, websites, software, system updates, and improved user experiences, rarely stopping to reflect on the impact of our work beyond the user.

Recently the social implications of digital products have gotten some attention thanks to Mike Montiero’s Ruined by Design and The Center for Humane Tech’s The Social Dilemma, but the environmental impact of digital is much less discussed or understood, let alone taken into consideration in the design process.

But it should be! As digital designers we are in a position to influence the impact our products have on the world and I firmly believe that environmental sustainability should be at the center of our efforts.

Side note: I’m not downplaying the importance of social sustainability here, but rather want to raise awareness about environmental sustainability in digital design.

Why don’t we think about the environmental impact of digital design?

One reason could be that in the fast-paced work environment where resources (such as time and money) are always running short, we simply don’t have the capacity to think about sustainability.

Another reason could be that digital is intangible and, unlike material products, it doesn’t take up physical space, so it is hard to comprehend that it indeed has a tangible impact. It is easy to fall for the idea that digital just floats weightlessly in the cloud, not hurting anyone. But this innocent image couldn’t be further away from the truth.

How does digital design have an impact on the environment?

To understand the environmental impact of our design work we need to look beyond the product itself.

1. Hardware

Our digital products need a physical infrastructure to be stored, distributed, and used: computers, phones, servers, routers, etc. The production and disposal of the hardware components has a huge environmental impact. In 2019 we created 53.6 million metric tons of e-waste, as much as if everyone in the world would have thrown out 5 laptops. Just in one year! And as new tech innovations encourage constant upgrades in hardware, e-waste is expected to increase, to 74 million Mt by 2030.

What is the role of digital design in this? Research shows that the hardware and software upgrade cycles are closely connected. Just think about old iPhones not being able to handle new IOS updates, so people are kind of forced to get new phones if they want to have the latest updates. The general rule is that as software evolves and becomes more complex and more powerful, or simply just gets packed with overkill features and design frills, it requires better hardware. So people are buying faster, stronger machines, throwing away older, but otherwise perfectly working devices.

2. Energy

Digital products also need energy through their lifecycle: as we design them, as they are stored and as users interact with them. The rule of thumb is: the bigger the size of the file, the more energy it uses. So a website with 100 pictures will use more energy than a website with 10 pictures. A web page that auto-plays video in the header will require more energy than a webpage that uses a picture.

Data centers, aka “the cloud”, where we store most of our digital stuff are one of the most energy-intensive parts of IT.

“On average, servers and cooling systems account for the greatest shares of direct electricity use in data centers, followed by storage drives and network devices. Some of the world’s largest data centers can each contain many tens of thousands of IT devices and require more than 100 megawatts (MW) of power capacity — enough to power around 80,000 U.S. households (U.S. DOE 2020).” — Energy Innovation

So no, just because we can’t touch digital, it doesn’t mean it has no tangible impact. It requires 24/7 energy input, emitting tonnes of CO2.

3. User behaviour

Digital products also influence users’ behavior. While there are many apps and websites aiming to help users make more environmentally friendly decisions (like saving energy or using public transportation instead of a car) there are other types of digital products that promote unsustainable behavior. For example e-commerce sites nudging people to buy more than they need by recommending related products, and showing social proof. Digital designers can use persuasive technologies, nudging, and behavioral insights to influence individual behaviour for better or worse in terms of environmental impact.

Why should we think about the impact of digital design on the environment?

The above are just a few examples to illustrate the environmental impact of digital design and I have a few resources at the end of the article if you want to learn more. The bottom line is: digital design does have an environmental impact and as designers we have the responsibility to know about these impacts and strive to minimize them.

Not because sustainability is trendy, or because it can improve the image of the company, but because caring for and protecting the environment is the only way forward.

It has been said many times, but we tend to forget: we don’t have the luxury to destroy our life support system (nature), because Earth is our only home. There is no planet B to escape to when we have destroyed this one, no matter how much space company owning billionaires try to convince us otherwise.

But if I can’t convince you with altruistic reasons, here is another one: sustainability makes a good business. Sustainability measures, such as smaller file sizes, straightforward user journeys, cutting out unnecessary content, contribute to faster page load, better overall user experience, cost savings, and even reaching a wider audience. In other words, thinking about sustainability will help us design products that more people will enjoy using over and over again.

Some questions to think about

Unfortunately, sustainability is not as straightforward as just reducing picture size. At least not always. Since I’m writing my master thesis about this topic, I’ve been reading and thinking about the complexities of sustainability and UX design, and I would like to raise some questions for the design community to think about.

1. Is human-centered design sustainable?

In his book Designing for Sustainability, Tim Frick makes the point:

people-friendly = planet-friendly

He explains, if you create the most straightforward and lean user experience for your audience, you can save a lot of energy: no need to create/store unnecessary content, extra pages on the website, etc.

But then there is a flipside to this coin. What happens if this super-streamlined user flow leads to unsustainable behaviour? For example, the Amazon “Buy now” button. Most efficient for the user, they can buy anything with one click, but that is also the problem. Making shopping this easy (too easy) leads to impulse buying, mindless overconsumption and eventually increasing amount of stuff thrown into the garbage.

Tim Frick uses the human-centered design lens and argues for sustainability on a technical level (designing for reduced energy consumption), while he misses accounting for the potentially unsustainable behavioural implications.

So how do we balance this? There are already some actors out there who question the almighty superiority of human-centered design, but we need more designers thinking critically, and discussing how to integrate a wider perspective in the design process.

2. Do we need all the sensors?

Designers can help users understand their behaviour by visualizing data collected through sensors. For example, showing how much electricity one uses, and nudging them to reduce it. While this visualization can be helpful to influence individual behaviour for the better, sensors themselves have a huge negative environmental impact. Not only directly, through production and e-waste, but also indirectly through the data they collect. Gerry McGovern explains in his book, World Wide Waste, that we only use 10% of the collected data. If we do the math right, it means that 90% of the data is waste, useless, yet we store it in energy-hungry clouds, adding more and more servers to host our hundreds of zettabytes of digital trash.

We see the tension here again: from a behavioral perspective it can be beneficial to have the sensors because we can use the data to visualize behavior, but from a technical perspective these excessive amounts of sensors as well as the collected data are a burden for the planet.

3. Sustainable UX and the unsustainable business models

And finally, let’s discuss the tension between business models and sustainable UX design. For example, a company based on a linear model (take-make-waste) has the goal to sell as much as possible on its e-commerce site to get the highest possible profit. Excessive resource use in the form of unnecessary consumption is one of the main contributors to environmental problems. So buying less crap is the best thing we can do. Then the question is: how can a responsible-minded UX designer nudge users to buy less when the company’s goal is to sell more?

Let’s have a discussion!

I don’t have the answer to these questions, but I think it is important to start thinking about them (and many others) to better understand UX’s role in sustainability and its power to bring sustainable solutions within defined systems (such as the organization and the economy).

My hope is that this article will spark a discussion, raise awareness about the importance and complexity of sustainability in UX, and maybe even get you, dear designers, to reflect a bit on your role in shaping today’s and tomorrow’s tech.

What do you think? Can/ should environmental sustainability be a central part of digital design? What other tensions do you see between technical and behavioural sustainability? What alternatives do you see to human-centered design?

Resources:

Designing for Sustainability — Tim Frick

World Wide Waste — Gerry McGovern

World Wide Waste with Gerry McGovern — UI Breakfast (podcast)

Beyond Human-Centered Design — Space10

Advancing Sustainable Interaction Design — Eli Blevis

Design won’t save us — Jesse Weaver

Sustainable web design — James Christie

How 6 million Pounds of Electronic Waste gets Recycled a Month — Business Insider (video)

ToxiCity: life at Agbobloshie, the world’s largest e-waste dump in Ghana — RT Documentary

A vital topic to discuss: sustainability in and through digital design was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How much electronic waste is there?

In 2019, the world generated a striking 53.6 million tonnes of e-waste. That means 7.3 kg per person. 7.3 kg e-waste is like throwing away 40 smartphones, or 5 laptops or 3 blenders or 1 hoover.

So just imagine every person in the world throwing out 40 smartphones, and you will have a realistic picture of electronic waste in a year. (Of course in reality the e-waste is not only smartphones, but it is also laptops, TVs, printers, cameras, fridges, washing machines, air conditioners, just to mention a few examples.)

I would like to repeat: this is just in one year. And we will create this amount of e-waste next year. Except that it will be even more.

The total weight (excluding solar panels) of electronics consumed increases every year by 2.5 million tonnes globally. This means that e-waste is going to increase too, to 74.7 million tonnes by 2030 according to the UN Global E-Waste Monitor report.

All this electronic waste has serious environmental and human costs.

Before we can toss our electronics into the trash, they have to be produced. Electronics use rare metals and minerals that require ever more aggressive and destructive mining techniques, leaving areas devastated, polluted, broken, and stripped of biodiversity.

Mining is a toxic and dirty industry that not only threatens the health of miners but also puts nearby communities in danger. Water and air pollution is guaranteed in the mining areas leading to different diseases in the local communities or migration. On top of health hazards, miners are facing long hours, minimum salary, and inhumane treatment. And I should mention that miners are frequently children. In addition, rare mineral mining is usually located in developing countries such as Bolivia, Chile, and South Africa, where it can lead to armed conflict.

Rare minerals are not the only problem though. Manufacturing electronic devices is energy, water, and CO2 intensive. According to Greenpeace, three-quarters of the complete lifecycle CO2 emission of a phone happens during the manufacturing process and as the devices become more complex, they require more energy to produce. And there are also plastic and hazardous chemicals involved in the production. And let’s not forget about the working conditions in assembly factories that are not much better (if at all) than mining working conditions.

Even if this is not a detailed list of all the impacts, clearly electronics production is harmful in many aspects.

But at least all this exploitation, all the pollution, all the destruction is for a good cause, one could hope. Nope. But you saw that coming.

According to a Greenpeace report, 78% of smartphone sales is estimated to be attributed to existing smartphone consumers replacing their phones. In 2020, smartphone vendors sold around 1.38 billion smartphones worldwide, so if we make the calculations it means a little more than 1 billion phones were sold just because people wanted a new one. So all the exploitation, pollution, and destruction is for a cause: consumerism.

Why do we consume so much electronics?

In the take-make-dispose linear economic model that most electronic producers follow, income is from selling a product. The more they sell, the more they earn. So the goal is to sell as much as possible regardless of environmental and human costs. For that, companies have to convince consumers to consume. To buy new gadgets year after year. How can they do that? Here are some tricks used in the industry:

1. Launch new products every year that makes the previous models look and feel obsolete. We got to a point where the actual improvement in devices is marginal, but with clever marketing, companies can make it seem like that the new shape and the added one pixel in the camera will change lives. This is called perceived obsolescence.
2. Intentionally designing devices to break after a certain period (planned obsolescence), and making the repair difficult (for example with glued in batteries and proprietary screws).
3. Telecommunication companies offer plans that include switching devices every year. Do we need a phone every year? Absolutely not. But since it is part of the deal, why not? These types of deals are not only dangerous because they are incentivizing unnecessary consumption but also because they teach people the wrong values.
4. Intentionally designing low-quality, cheap products to encourage continuous consumption.
5. Stores and banks offer microloans and buy-now-pay-later services to make it easier for people to buy more.

Thanks to these practices, we think of electronic devices as disposable, readily available all the time, and affordable. We don’t think twice about buying a new phone, a TV, or a laptop, we buy because we can, not because we need.

And it is not only private individuals who like to get shiny new gadgets: companies constantly upgrade their equipment, buy new computers for new hires instead of using what they already have, order stuff in bulk and later realize that half of them are not even used.

The unnecessary, excessive consumption is already an enormous burden for the planet, but there is more coming. 5G will make us ditch our electronics even faster. Most of the current devices are incompatible with the faster speed of 5G, and this will lead to a mass upgrade in smartphones, routers, and other connected gadgets.

What a bummer it will be when corporations realize that those scientists were right, and there is a need for more renewable energy. How will we be able to build green tech when the majority of the necessary raw materials are already used in disposable electronic gadgets?

Easy, you would say, recycling.

Recycling of e-waste

Recycling would be a great idea indeed! According to a BBC article “One tonne of iPhones would deliver 300 times more gold than a tonne of gold ore and 6.5 times more silver than a tonne of silver ore.” What a deal, right? Nope! Apparently getting the minerals out from old phones is more difficult / less economical than destroying the planet and people’s lives to mine them.

In 2020 only 17% of all electronic waste got recycled. Why? Mostly because designers, aligning with the linear model, focus on making manufacturing easy but not a lot of thought is given to end-of-life handling. Products are difficult to disassemble or use hard to recycle materials, neither of which helps the case of recycling. Even if e-waste recycling is improving, it can not keep pace with overconsumption and the rapid disposal of devices. Thus the majority of our electronics end up in landfills, where they release toxic heavy metals like mercury, arsenic, and lead, or get incinerated where they release toxic compounds in the air.

On the bright side: we are getting disillusioned with tech “innovation”

The 2-year smartphone upgrade cycle seems to be broken, partly because of the 50% increase in handset price since 2016, partly because the hype around tech innovation in phones start to settle down and consumers start to realize that improvement between devices is marginal, and partly because fewer people are signing up for long term contracts that offer the predictable replacement cycles. The secondhand and refurbished market is growing, and there is Fairphone holding its stand against giant corporations.

What can we do to reduce electronic waste?

Private person:

• Use electronics as long as possible.
• Repair instead of buying new
• Buy second-hand.
• Refuse to buy cheap, throwaway stuff. Invest in long-lasting, quality products.
• Buy only what you need.
• Recycle — find a company that takes back your electronics to recover the minerals and metals.

Companies producing electronics:

• Find a sustainable business model. Can you turn your product into a long term service? Can you earn money on repairing instead of selling new?
• Produce quality products so customers don’t have to buy a new gadget every year.
• Design for modularity and easy repair.
• Offer repair service / spare parts to extend the device’s life span.
• Design for standards so your products are compatible with other devices, parts can easily be replaced, etc.
• Clean up your supply chain: only work with / buy from companies who don’t exploit their workers and pollute the environment.
• Use clean energy in the production.

Companies using electronics (so technically every single company):

• Limit your electronic purchase to what your employees need. Don’t buy a bunch of stuff just because you get e great business deal, or because it might be useful later.
• Re-use equipment! If someone leaves the company, their equipment is NOT poisonous! Other people still can use it! Don’t buy new stuff for every new hire!
• Dispose of the old devices responsibly!

Government:

• Introduce laws that oblige manufacturers to take back and take care of their own devices.
• Invest in more efficient electronics recycling programs.

— — — — — — — — — —

What do you think? What else can we do to reduce e-waste?

Why do we have millions of tonnes of electronic waste, and what can we do about it? was originally published in impactology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Gift giving is an integral part of our culture. We have many occasions to splurge on our loved ones, birthdays, weddings, diplomas, anniversaries, but Christmas is the biggest of them all.

In 2020 retail sales in the US soared by $789.4 billion during the holidays. Just to put it in perspective, Saudi Arabia’s GDP is $687 billion. The average gift budget was approximately $700 spent on fashion and clothing, electronics, toys, and home and kitchenware. While 1 in 3 Americans expect to go into debt to buy christmas presents this year, 61% of Amercians (154 million people) express that they get at least one unwanted gift. That is a minimum of 154 million pieces of gifts that Americans shouldn’t have bought. Finder estimates that americans wasted $15.2 billion on unwanted gifts.

(Here I used stats from the US because those are the most available, but the tendencies in wasteful gifting habits are similar in Europe.)

We have a problem here folks! We buy crap for others that they don’t want or need from the money we don’t have.

If gifting is such a big burden, why do we do it? Why do we feel the need to take on debt just to buy presents for others? Why do we feel obliged to give each other crap we don’t need? Why is it quantity over quality when it comes to gifts?

Before I discuss these questions, I want to start by saying that giving gifts is not inherently evil. Obviously. Thoughtful gifts can bring us joy, strengthen our relationships, season our lives with surprises, and help us handle new life situations (for example new parents getting a stroller as a gift.) This article is not about criticising the tradition of gift giving, but rather what it had become in the 20th century. The mindless and toxic gifting traditions that we perform year after year thanks to clever marketing and social pressure.

Toxic for the planet, because of the resources used up to produce and distribute all the crap we buy, and let’s not forget about the waste from all the unwanted gifts that go straight to the landfill from under the tree. Toxic for the giver, because they can spend up to 20 hours searching for gifts, and can end up in debt, not to mention all the stress that comes with all this. And finally, toxic for the receiver because they are burdened with presents that they don’t want, and it becomes their responsibility to dispose of them (hopefully responsibly) or store them in the back of the closet where they become clutter.

But Christmas hasn’t always been about excessive gift giving.

Christmas in Europe was originally a Christian holiday celebrating the birth of Jesus by sharing meals and love with others. German, Dutch and English immigrants brought their Christmas traditions to the US around the 17th century, and over time these traditions were shaped to fit the American lifestyle and way of thinking. As Dr. Ruth McClelland-Nugent, a pop culture scholar says:

“Capitalism helps take these sorts of European traditions from two different places — the German tradition and the English tradition — and meld them into something new.”

Around the mid 19th century retailers in the US smelled the profit they could make from selling gifts for this special occasion. From that point on, Christmas has transformed into a cultural and most importantly a commercial phenomena. Profit-hungry companies and their marketing departments shaped Christmas as we know it today.

For example, the modern Santa Claus is the result of commercial ambitions. Before the well-known jolly and plump father figure there were many different depictions of the character, some elvish and some were even grumpy. Today’s Santa is based on a religious figure, St. Nicholas, who brought chocolate to children on the 6th of December in European culture. Santa kept Nick’s red robes and generous giving character but otherwise were revamped into a friendly enough figure to appear in advertising and sell products. While Coca-Cola is the most well-known company who used Santa in their ads, there were many other brands and artists who took their fair share in shaping this figure. According to Coke’s webpage:

“Coca-Cola did not create the legend of Santa Claus. But Coca-Cola advertising did play a big role in shaping the jolly character we know today.”

Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, is a result of content marketing. Montgomery Ward (department store) commissioned Robert Lewis May to write a story for their yearly Christmas coloring book. Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer debuted in 1939 and was sold in 2.4 million copies.

Department stores also learned how to capture the financial value of the holiday spirit. To entice customers, department stores arranged tasteful Christmas decorations to put customers in a jolly mood and encourage them to open their wallets. In 1862 Macy’s was the first department store to have a live Santa as part of their marketing campaign, and thanks to the overwhelming success, mall Santas have become fixtures of the modern holiday shopping.

In a nutshell, from Rudolph to Santa to some of the most quintessential decorations, are results of commercial interests to exploit traditions and sentiments for a profit.

Today, Christmas is the pinnacle of consumerism, stores starting Christmas marketing as early as October, and Black Friday and Cyber Monday morphing into one long shopping season. People are spending morbid amount of money in attempts to express their love and appreciation towards others. As Dr. Paul Harrison, a consumer behaviour expert explains:

“One norm of behaviour that has evolved over time, partly through clever conditioning of consumers by skilled marketers, is to equate the amount of money we spend on a gift to how much we value or love the recipient. That notion, inadvertently, is not great for consumption and the environment.”

Marketers, job well done, that is exactly what we do today. If we want to show how much we love someone we buy a bunch of stuff for them. But what are all those stuff worth if nobody knows about them?

Spoiling children with gifts is a trendy social media content. Maybe it is because parents take inspiration from “Christmas wishlist” videos, where youtubers share x amount of Christmas gift ideas. If you don’t have ideas about what to ask for Christmas, you can just pick one of the items that stand on the list. You don’t need any of it? That is not the point. The point is: you get gifts for Christmas. So even if you don’t need anything (because let’s face it, if you really needed something, you would have known that without getting inspiration from someone else) you can still ask for crap you will use for 2 weeks.

After Christmas starts the flow of vlogs about “what I got for Christmas haul” where kids/teens spend half an hour to show all the items they got one by one. In the disclaimer they usually mention that Christmas is not about getting gifts, it is also about giving, but most importantly spending time with family. After watching them pulling out 20–50 gifts, I question the genuineness of their words for some reason. And I’m also wondering, if giving is equally important, why there are no “what I gave for Christmas” videos?

Sometimes parents even make their kids open their heaps of Christmas gifts in front of the camera. But it is equally easy to peek into a Kardashian Christmas and see how Kylie Jenner’s one year old gets a diamond ring and a luxury playhouse.

It is not only the kids who use social media to display their expensive or excessive amount of gifts. Girlfriends use #boydidgood to brag about the perfect gifts they get from their boyfriends. Or apparently use the hashtag on gifts that they bought for themselves to save themselves from some humiliation if the boyfriend’s gift was not up to the standards.

These social media contents shape, perhaps rather distort, the perception of the younger generation about the purpose and scope of gift giving. Kids’ expectations towards Santa can grow unrealistic and if those expectations are not fulfilled, tantrums are in place. Parents comply, maybe because they genuinely believe that more crap will make their children happy, or maybe because they are just mindlessly following the norms portrayed in social media.

Christmas is a great example of how clever marketing and distorted depiction of social norms work hand in hand to reinforce and promote consumerism and materialistic values. And while it can be detrimental for the planet, our mental health, and financial well-being, it is rather convenient for companies. After all holiday shopping can account for up to 30% of all retail sales. And that is what really counts.

While the materialistic gift giving culture is going strong and it still dominates the market and people’s mindset, it doesn’t mean that everybody participates in it. There are many examples of opting out from obligatory gift giving or giving more mindful gifts. However these approaches are sometimes still frowned upon and usually underrepresented in mainstream media. For example if you look at popular gift guidelines, (or the wishlist videos) you will find that 98% of the list is stuff, and only 2% is about non-material gifts.

So here we go, this is how our gifting culture makes it hard to stop shopping. But we must change this. This excessive gift giving is ruining the planet and leave us in debt, but more frighteningly builds unsustainable expectations and social norms for the generations to come.

As I said in the beginning, gifts can be great and useful. We just have to become better at finding gifts that bring value to our lives. And we have to learn to be okay with not giving /getting gifts when we don’t need them.

I think people need a lot of help and education to get over these unsustainable gift giving norms. That is why I started a new Instagram account. Gifts_but_better will be a platform where I’m going to collect ideas for how to give better gifts: non-material, budget friendly and thoughtful. So if you are interested, follow me there!

Why is it so hard to stop shopping? — Part3: Materialistic gift giving culture was originally published in impactology on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.