Climate-Centered Experience Design: An Intro

Each morning we wake up to new news about the terrors of climate change and our collective lack of urgency.

The problem simultaneously seems far away and right on our doorstep. There are, perhaps, billions of motivated people, willing to help, but left to their own devices and despite their best efforts, they continue to grow their emissions debt.

It’s even more stunning that we’re amidst a changing of the “generational guards” with Millennials and Generation Z stepping into the lion’s share of power. They’re the investors, employees, and consumers who are demanding sustainable agendas from the companies that support their lives. Yet, business-as-usual behavior persists. From consumers and from companies.

What drives that dissonance? Are we paralyzed by the doom and gloom? Are we waiting for a political shift to sweep us off our feet? Or is there something else getting in the way of taking quick action?

Our automatic overlords

Maybe a secret lies in our defaults. We make thousands of decisions every day — as many as 35,000 of them 😳 — and, when we spend around 8 hours a day on digital screens, it’s clear that we’re using those experiences on our screens to offload an enormous number of decisions.

We already know the extraordinary power of the digital experiences we use. Plenty of pixels have been spilled describing the brainless, automatic nature of checking notifications or our subscription services or the social media apps polarizing our political discourse. These digital experiences have the power to shape our minds, our relationships, our culture, and our politics.

However, we largely ignore the role of digital experiences in our climate strategy. Which is odd, because many of the digital experiences that establish our everyday, default behaviors are run by businesses that have aggressive, industry-leading and unrealized climate goals.

Take Walmart for example. They sold $73 billion worth of goods in digital channels last year and Walmart.com alone sees up to 100 million visitors monthly. Huge digital scale. And their Project Gigaton wants to avoid 1 gigaton (Gt) of emissions (Co2e) by 2030. Huge emissions goal. 91% of their emissions come from upstream suppliers and downstream use of their products. Their work on suppliers is voluntary, and they currently have no disclosed strategy for addressing the ~30 MtCO2e of annual downstream emissions from their customers. A behavior gap.

“Perhaps one of the most powerful impacts multinational companies like Walmart can have is to influence and shift the actions of others: industry, consumers and government.” Guardian, 2021

Like Walmart, many businesses have significant emissions from customer behavior. In addition to the hard and important(!) work on Scopes 1 and 2, we need to close the Scope 3 gaps in corporate sustainability plans where digital experiences can—and must—shift customer behavior to meet company and climate goals, while still driving the outcomes that our businesses demand, like acquisition, retention, AOV, LTV.

Making green easy

We can use the tools of behavioral economics and choice architecture to nudge behaviors to ones that are better for the planet (while still being good for business). We’re indebted to Thaler and Sunstein, Robert Caldini, Nir Eyal, Don Norman, Dan Kahneman, Charles Duhigg, BJ Fogg, and Dan Ariely, among many, many others, who have helped expose the hidden procedures our brains use to efficiently make decisions in this digital/physical world of ours. We’ve largely exploited these lessons for the sake of profit, but these authors themselves ask us to aspire to more.

One of the simplest principles is famously difficult to apply:

“If you want to encourage some action or activity, Make It Easy.” Thaler & Sunstein, Nudge, 2008

And the inverse holds true, too: if you want to make it harder, create barriers.

We’re on a mission to uncover what’s possible when you make the green decision the easy decision. Remember, too, the green decision tends to be the one consumers want to make! Just like those motion-activated light switches that turn off automatically and on when someone uses the room, we think it’s imperative that all digital experiences take the mindset of making the green choice easy, default, and automatic.

We call it CCXD

Climate-centered experience design (CCXD) is an evolution of human-centered design that places the priorities of ecosystems and communities on equal footing with the needs and goals of customers and companies. It’s looking at the way digital experiences currently meet the needs of their customers and finding opportunities for behavioral nudges that meet both shared and company climate goals.

Behavioral nudges in specific sectors have a massive opportunity to make the impacts we all want and need. Below is a starting list, that represents up to an estimated 823 Gt (gigatons) of emissions as a Total Addressable Market (TAM), of sorts, for global emissions.

Positive shifts already

The good news is we’re already seeing features that can create greener behaviors rolling out in some high traffic experiences (and we’ll dig into these, and more, examples in future posts):

• Oracle (formerly Opower) has been pioneering this kind of thinking since 2008 with hundreds of innovations for customer engagement in utilities. Recently, they used behavioral science techniques to shift EV charging load to off-peak hours, reducing the number of times utilities needed to turn on expensive, carbon-intensive peaking plants.
• Amazon last week launched Amazon Aware, a brand of “consciously created” products and created a dedicated digital storefront, sorting and filtering options, and “Climate Pledge Friendly”—their new product certification program—badges on products.
• Etsy celebrates the impact you’ve made while shopping with them within each customer profile, while educating their users on sustainable shopping alternatives, like purchasing vintage items on their platform.
• Chipotle touts it’s Real Foodprint impact tracker throughout its entire online/app ordering experience to drive ingredient transparency for customers while holding their company accountable to improve their practices and to source more sustainably over time.
• And, of course, Everlane, Grove Collaborative, Patagonia, and many others are green companies at their core and integrating features to minimize their Scope 3 emissions. Y’all inspire us.

To be clear, behavioral nudges alone won’t solve our climate emergency. Many additional, structural changes need to happen to keep us from the 2º+ scenarios. But the tools and practices of CCXD can address those gaps in corporate sustainability goals that have long been difficult to tap.

Plus, similar to the emissions problem that got us here, every little bit counts.

You should practice CCXD, too

Here at Dayani, we’re uniquely positioned to help sustainability leaders take on this line of thinking, by combining UX strategy, design, and development practitioners with sustainability professionals to create green behaviors. We’ve spent our careers driving design leadership at large organizations to nudge customer behavior, almost entirely by making it easier for users to do what they already want to do.

But we don’t want to be the only ones performing CCXD. We want you to, too. So over the next several weeks and months, we’re going to be unpacking what CCXD can do across several industries and experiences: food ordering and delivery apps, fast fashion, e-commerce and home goods, energy efficiency, air travel and transportation, and on and on.

We want you to adopt our thinking, bring it to your company, grow this offering everywhere. Even better, you can reach out to us to help. 😉

We have no time for business-as-usual.

❤️, Dayani