(ECD) Environmentally conscious design (Eco-design) audit of an existing digital service: Vamos

Durability and sustainability are becoming essential practices for companies and organisations. Environmentally conscious design of digital services is a step that can’t be skipped inside IT department services. A new version of the RGESN / GEGDS (General Ecodesign Framework for Digital Services) has been recently published. At Extia, we have adapted and used this framework for one of our digital services. We performed an eco-design audit of Vamos, which helped us highlight all eco-conceptual details and present constructive feedback.

In contrast with previous cases regarding the environmentally conscious design (ECD) and eco-design of digital services, this time we chose to audit an existing service called Vamos. This digital tool has been internally developed for years. Vamos has many purposes, such as providing support and monitoring of customer/client relationships, recruiting management,and corporate life and events. Vamos development teams work to reduce global environmental impact by enhancing existing digital services rather than adding and creating new layers of eco-conceived digital services.

In this article, we share our methods, discoveries, and what we learned from our experience with Vamos in the hope of guiding other companies on the same journey.

Context and objectives

Our aim is to put digital technology at the service of sustainability and progress, so it was obvious that he had to perform a detailed eco-design analysis of Vamos. To carry out this study, we have used two examples:

• The RGESN (General Ecodesign Framework for Digital Services) provides a set of 70 technical and organisational tools, covering all professions involved in the creation of a digital service: Architects, UX Designers, Ops, Developers, Business Departments, etc.

• The EcoIndex is a tool that can rapidly analyse the environmental impact of a website. We have supplemented this tool with data that can analyse other impacts, such as sent emails, for example.

Eco-design audit in 3 steps:

1. Define the functional units to measure the impact of the service

Eco-design, closely inspired by Life cycle assessment (LCA) (or life cycle analysis), primarily focuses on the business functions that the website or app possesses. Therefore, the first stage of the study involved analysing the various Functional Units of Vamos (FBUs) (with advice and data given by the Business Department).

With these functions, we can create practical user journeys and select the pages for analysis, one by one, with EcoIndex. Once these metrics have been obtained, they can be added together to evaluate the impact of a user journey, and even of the overall service over the year.

2. Fully evaluate the eco-design of a service.

The RGESN has helped us evaluate the maturity of the project. We have planned exchanges with every actor involved in the development in order to examine the different criteria mentioned in the RGESN framework. The results of that evaluation have been added to the retrieved data from the digital service; in that way, we can have a precise overview of the situation and even add changes.

3. Fit into a midterm road-map.

The aim of our audit wasn’t only to obtain a general overview of the current situation. We wanted to add general changes to the service. We held discussions with the project management and sponsors to understand and learn more about the planned changes. We actually classified them regarding their impact in terms of eco-design (favourable, unfavourable, or neutral). These discussions enabled us to plan the needed technical actions in order to limit the environmental impact of the service.

Results of the study

We have studied dozens of functional units (user journeys), covering at least 41 web pages. The impact of sent emails (by the app) has also been included in our analysis.

1. Analysis of web pages

On average, the EcoIndex of the audited pages is 68.5, which corresponds to a C grade. This is above average for the web pages used to calibrate the EcoIndex, which can go as high as a G grade. Overall, each page requires 35 requests to display, contains 420 elements in its DOM, and weighs 1.4 MB.

The most optimised page achieves an EcoIndex of 84 (A grade), while the least optimised page has an EcoIndex of 52 (D grade).

As Vamos is developed as a Single-Page Application (SPA), the first page has a higher impact, while subsequent pages are relatively light, with little data to load.

2. Environmental impact

In terms of environmental impact, the basic user journey has a footprint of 1.4 gCO2e and consumes 2.18 cl of water, while the most complex produces 38 gCO2e and consumes 29.5 cl of water. These statistics include sent emails, for which we only have the CO2 emissions. Over the course of a year, Vamos' environmental footprint is estimated at 703 kg of CO2e; this equals driving 5,865 km in a car. Emails account for around 40% of this impact.

3. RGESN Maturity

With the RGESN, we have analysed and evaluated 75 out of 79 criteria, and we have obtained a global maturity grade of 56%. These results show that Vamos is already a step ahead regarding certain aspects, but there is still room for progress and improvement in terms of eco-design.

What do we learn from that eco-design audit?

1. Eco design is a guarantee of quality for applications.

This is the first ever audit that we have carried out on Vamos.

At first glance, it is quite surprising that the maturity stat is at 56% (in accordance with the RGESN framework) and that the majority of the pages audited have an above-average EcoIndex score.

This is due to one of the main eco-design strategies, which is enabling every actor to create and work on high-quality projects. Working with the UX app and user journeys has enabled us to reduce the environmental impact. The application is aimed at a properly defined business sector; we avoided the development of unnecessary functions that would have made the pages too long.

RGESN frameworks reflect sustainable practices such as minimising server requests during user input (using a debounce on auto-completions, for example), validating forms as soon as possible, compressing transferred resources, etc.

Giving quality time and resources to dev’ teams is one of the first conditions that will help reduce the environmental impact of a digital service.

2. Minimise data storage and analysis, including emails.

Data management is crucial when developing an application; you need to know how to collect, stock, process, and use the data correctly. This involves adopting a maximalist approach, often communicating via email, for example, and stocking the data for as long as possible.

GDPR has encouraged companies to make the data anonymous after a certain amount of time. The RGESN pushes us to go even further by completely suppressing the non-needed data. The lifecycle of data is a blind spot in strategies and development, it can be justified in multiple ways, including respecting the norms, minimising the cost of the database, and therefore limiting its environmental footprint.

With Vamos, we began to think about how old data could be used for traceability or aggregate indicators, while at the same time reducing its volume.

We saw that a lot of data is being used when sending non targeted emails. We recognise that the environmental impact of emails is not the main issue of Green IT and that deleting them has only a marginal impact. It is true that the mass sending of emails can be revised and limited in order to reduce environmental impact.

3. We can only take action on what we measure and control.

The final lesson that we can draw from this audit is the vital importance of measuring environmental impact. It is crucial to control it, in order to fix the limits and take action.

Setting a page weight limit of 1 MB enables developers to direct their choice towards lighter solutions, avoid heavy CSS frameworks, and quickly find possible optimisations for media.

One of the main Vamos pages weighs 4.2 MB. If we convert the images to a WebP format (keeping the dimensions of their actual display), it could save 3 MB of transferred data.

These actions allow us to set realistic goals. For pages with a D grade EcoIndex, we estimated that, with only 3 simple actions (image optimisation, standard font, delayed loading time for certain resources and information), we could easily achieve a C grade.

Monitoring indicators are not just technical (page weight) or environmental (GHGs or EcoIndex).They are also financial if we use a FinOps approach. Cloud Providers offer carbon footprint calculators, such as Azure, AWS or GCP. They use customers' invoiced amounts in order to estimate greenhouse gas emissions by applying an emissions coefficient per euro spent. In the Cloud, controlling the amount of your invoice means controlling your carbon footprint.

Conclusion

Vamos' audit revealed that, in terms of maturity and environmental impact, the app is ranked slightly above average compared to other conventional web applications. Despite the progress made, there is still room for improvement. Simple actions and processes will significantly improve our EcoIndex ranking.

The quality of the software has enabled us to get one step closer to an eco-designed application. Now it’s crucial to maintain and even improve the quality of our solution while thinking about data minimization and email management in order to reduce its environmental impact.