Document analysis: Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG)

I identified document analysis as a pertinent research approach for my ARP, based on my reading of Bowen (2009).

Why choose the WSG for analysis?

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded by Tim Berners-Lee (creator of the web) in 1994 to ensure the long-term growth of the web. (World Wide Web Consortium 2023). They provide web standards that those developing websites should follow in order to ensure quality.

These include the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, which in line with the 2018 accessibility regulations must be followed by all public sector bodies – including universities. In my role as a learning technologist, understanding and following these guidelines is vital to ensure online learning content at UAL is accessible and inclusive and this has been a large focus of my PgCert coursework.

Therefore when W3C released the draft version of the WSG in 2023 this signalled a big moment for web sustainability as there is now a recognised standard for this and designated guidelines for best practice. While it is not yet a legally binding standard like the accessibility guidelines, it signals the intent for where we need to go next.

Overview of the WSG

• Nearly 100 guidelines for making websites and digital products more sustainable.
• Guidelines are divided into user experience design, web development, hosting infrastructure & systems, and business strategy & product management.
• Guidelines are also categorised by their impact level from low to medium to high.
• They are also categorised by their effort level from low to medium to high.

Strategy for analysis

One parallel I can draw between accessibility guidelines and sustainability guidelines is that both can feel like complex concepts that are difficult to understand and deliver. To help build a foundation of understanding, learning technologists in helping colleagues understand digital accessibility often focus on the easier topics (the more complex ones being things that learning technologists themselves can focus on). For this project I have taken a similar approach, as I think mastering the simpler aspects of web sustainability is a good place to start. Looking at the questionnaire results, UAL learning technologists 64% of respondents fell unconfident about advising other staff members about digital sustainability best practice.

For that reason I manually created a report that included only the low effort actions, as what I want to get from these guidelines are a select number of very easy things someone working in online learning can do now to bring sustainability into their practice.

Once I found all of the low effort actions, which totalled to 37, I needed to read through each them carefully and decide whether they would be feasible actions within the the context of online learning and UAL. So for example, guideline 4.5 “Limit Usage Of Additional Environments” might be a low effort action for someone involved in hosting, infrastructure and systems. However, it isn’t something a learning technologist or lecturer could do to make their online learning practice more sustainable. I therefore needed to read through each of the low effort guidelines to determine whether these could easily adopted within the online learning context at UAL.

The below file includes the analysis of low effort WSG and to what degree each guidelines could be feasible for UAL digital learning.

Findings and conclusions

There were ultimately 10 low effort digital sustainability guidelines that I considered to be feasible for UAL digital learning teams:

1. Take a More Sustainable Approach To Image (and media) Assets: “Of all the data which comprises the largest over-the-wire transfer rates within the average website or application, images are usually those which are responsible due to their quantity and usefulness. As such, doing all you can to reduce their size and unnecessary loading will be beneficial for reducing emissions.” This is especially pertinent for an art and design institution, where our image output and usage may well be higher than average and thus the need to do everything we can to reduce our emissions here. This involved assessing the need for images, considering the quantity, format, and size necessary for implementation, optimising images by resizing and compressing, having a maintenance and usage policy for images.
2. Write With Purpose, In An Accessible, Easy To Understand Format: this point nicely intersects with accessibility principles of writing clearly (without jargon or unnecessarily complicated language), using clear document structure, visual hierarchy, headings, bulleted lists, line spacing, and using defined and consistent terminologies/nomenclatures.
3. Reduce The Impact Of Downloadable Or Physical Documents: Sometimes PDFs are required but not always – can you convey the information through a Moodle page and then encourage students not to print where necessary? If you are using PDFs or other files, remember that most users don’t want documents to force download to their devices (especially on mobile). Be mindful of the file settings on Moodle so that documents open in a tab which is less carbon intensive that downloading and hosting unwanted files on multiple devices.
4. Be Mindful Of Duplicate Data: this is particularly relevant for course back ups. It’s wise to back up a Moodle courses in case something happens and data/content is wiped. However, for sustainability it’s good to have a storage plan for back-ups, ie removing outdated back-ups, storing them on Sharepoint or Moodle not in both places etc.
5. Consider Sustainability In Early Ideation ie by wire framing and prototyping (either online or on paper) Moodle sites rather than building a full blown experience for each idea.
6. Ensure Navigation And Way-finding Is Well-structured because the less time students need to trawl through a Moodle site to find what they’re looking for, the less energy will be used. Sometimes Moodle sites can be used as a sort of “dumping ground” for recordings and other random files without clear structure and design. There are therefore a multitude of benefits in avoiding this approach, with sustainability being one of them.
7. Respect The Visitor’s Attention this can be achieved by allowing them to easily control how (and when) they receive information (ie Moodle forum notifications) as well as avoiding using infinite scroll or related attention-keeping tactics. In previous research with students, infinite scroll has come up as a frustration with using Moodle and results in wasted effort of electricity.
8. Use Recognised Design Patterns: this is similar to the point about navigation, in the sense that interfaces should deploy visual styles (patterns) that are easily recognised and used. So in our Moodle context that might mean having a consistent design or template of Moodle pages for a programme so that students aren’t relearning how to use a Moodle site from unit to unit.
9. Develop A Mobile-first Layout: We don’t currently have the Moodle app rolled out at UAL. However testing our courses in mobile view is important to see if the design is responsive and easy to use, ultimately averting extra time online wasted trying to navigate through a poor mobile experience.
10. Establish If A Digital Product Or Service Is Necessary: Moodle sites are usually non-negotiable, ie every unit will need one etc. But what about digital resources supporting courses? Are there duplications in videos/PDF guides/blog posts? Achieving this one may require working with colleagues to identify overlaps and refine things.

What next?

The next thing will be to use these ten guidelines as a basis for an intervention that will help those involved in digital learning at UAL to incorporate sustainable practices into their work. You can read more about the intervention in this post.

References

Bowen, G.A. (2009) ‘Document analysis as a qualitative research method’, Qualitative Research Journal, 9(2), pp. 27–40. doi:10.3316/qrj0902027. 

World Wide Web Consortium (2023) About Us, W3C. Available at: https://www.w3.org/about/ (Accessed: 18 December 2023). 

World Wide Web Consortium (2023) Web sustainability guidelines (WSG) 1.0. Available at: https://w3c.github.io/sustyweb/ (Accessed: 04 January 2024).