Sustainability through digitalization

We are committed to adopting a sustainable strategic approach and design principles that guides our decisions and actions in all our collaborations while expanding our sustainability offerings to the market. Our client portfolio is a reflection of our values, and we must always consider how the companies we engage with affect both people and the planet.

Sustainability offerings

We're formalizing our first sustainability offering, a challenging area for our business. Our role in the sustainability value chain necessitates a comprehensive understanding to effectively apply it for our clients. Changing habits is a formidable task, and our digital experiences can indeed influence the world by fostering habit changes.

We consider:

• No involvement in potential companies associated with socially irresponsible(1) or unsustainable practices(2) and with no ambition to change.

Our main aim 2024:

• Add sustainability offerings to our services

• Growing our customer portfolio to represent clients who want to do projects that are rooted in sustainability goals.

• Separate Adapt entirely from companies with socially irresponsible or unsustainable practices as a core product or delivery.

Sustainability goals in projects

In our strategic facilitation, we will push for environmentally friendly and social responsibility considerations, ensuring that our projects not only meet their objectives but also contribute positively to the world around us. In other words we want to make the planet a stakeholder and make sure we also consider the overall value chain that the user journey is a part of.

We consider:

• The whole life cycle of the digital product we are creating. Are we causing any sustainability issues down the value chain?

• Mapping customer journeys from a full lifecycle perspective, e.g. using exercises from the Systemic Design Toolkit.

• Mapping the proposed solutions’ direct or indirect impact while analyzing its alignment with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 

• Setting project guidelines of which questions we should ask ourselves when we start up a new project for an existing or a new client

Our main aim 2024:

• Setting strategic and measurable targets with a sustainable offset in our collaborations.

• Building a Social Digital Responsibility (SDR)  guideline for clients to enable them to act socially responsible.

We strive to design based on thorough user research and thoughtful design thinking processes. We work closely with our clients to transform user needs into aesthetically pleasing designs that follow best practices. We will consider the environmental cost of meeting the user’s needs, while making sure we are creating the most efficient solution as possible, regardless of the user's background or abilities. 

Low-impact design

We pledge to design meaningful and creative experiences without having an outsized impact on the planet. We want to make more conscious and sustainable visual design decisions, by considering when to use eco-friendly color palettes and opting for hues that require less energy to display on screens to reduce the overall power consumption of digital devices. Additionally, we make efforts to employ media formats that are optimized for lower data usage and quicker loading times, thus decreasing the energy required for data transmission.

We consider:

• Letting the user choose what they want to focus on, e.g. avoiding auto-load of items such as videos or content.

• Minimize the use of heavy media types such as video and high-resolution images.

Our main aim 2024:

• Define guidelines for low-impact design in terms of color, font, and visual content to be used as default on client projects.

Efficiency in user experience

We are dedicated to creating intuitive products that are simple and easy to use. We strive for efficient solutions that have the least possible amount of friction for the user. However, optimizing the user experience also leads to less resource consumption and less server usage. By adopting Object-Oriented User Experience (OOUX) guidelines we can enhance our design process, so we make sure we reduce complexity in the digital solutions we build. OOUX starts by defining clear and distinct objects to be manipulated by the user, their purpose, and the relationship between them.

We consider:

• Making efficient user flows free from barriers, where the user has to go through a minimum amount of steps in order to quickly perform their task 

• Reusing components across projects, so we don’t end up developing a variety of similar components that each requires maintenance

• Broadening of the term of sustainability to also mean sustainable in terms of having long-lasting design

Our main aim 2024:

• Integrate principles inspired by OOUX into the Adapt design process, as a separate synthesis step before we go into the design, but after we have done user research. This involves training sessions and workshops with team members.

Digital inclusion & accessibility

Digital Inclusion refers to the equitable access to and meaningful use of digital technology and the Internet.  Adapt delivers digital experiences like websites and apps to end consumers. Our focus is therefore on making sure those experiences are designed and developed in ways that are accessible and usable by everyone, regardless of disabilities, age, socioeconomic status, or other factors.

We consider:

• Recognizable and consistent navigation

• Clear visual hierarchy and spacing

• Logical IA and clear CTAs

• Appropriate touch and click target sizes

• Sufficient color contrast and consideration for color blindness 

• Consistent user feedback and error handling

• Clear and concise language in copy/UX writing

Our main aim 2024:

• Define principles for more diverse user testing including people with disabilities.

• Define a process to avoid bias in recruitment for user testing, this is to meet the needs of everyone regardless of disabilities, age, socioeconomic status, or other relevant factors.

• Measure the emission of the digital products we build

• Apply guidelines for our solutions to be accessible to people with a diverse range of hearing, movement, sight, and cognitive ability.

We actively embrace open-source software to minimize the need for ground-up development. Our primary development work relies on popular programming languages and frameworks, allowing us to leverage pre-built functionality. To streamline our development process and reduce resource consumption, we adhere to agile development principles. When conducting code reviews, we prioritize performance optimization, to ensure smoother user experiences. This not only benefits end users but also decreases hardware resource usage, such as CPU cycles, leading to reduced power consumption. While developers often focus on performance, it is currently done from a business perspective. Thus, our developers will need to broaden their skill set in order to simultaneously and continuously consider the environmental impact of architectural and code decisions.

Back-end Development

Our backends and CMSs are written in a wide range of languages as well as frameworks. Some of our solutions have reached an age well beyond retirement being almost non-maintainable, and running on expired, non-optimized underlying software. We aim to initiate talks with clients on out-dated solutions to move them towards a sustainable platform.

The technical department has during the last year started specific talks about a transition towards more strongly typed languages in the years ahead. This transition should also include thoughts about the carbon footprint of the development, maintainability, and energy consumption.

Frontend & App Development

In recent years different types of Javascript frameworks hurdled towards more complexity and large codebases. This directly affects the consumption of each device, where the code gets executed.

With handheld devices, we should strive to use more caching (where possible) to prevent backend usage and unnecessary transport of data.

We consider:

• Architecture and development should focus on viable functionality

• Using frameworks and tools that are optimized and sturdy

• Maintainable, reusable and documented code

• Programming language performance vs. speed of development

• Support for the open source communities as an active part of the Rust & Laravel communities.

• WCAG-compliant development.

• Google Lighthouse to measure our performance on all projects.

Our main aim 2024:

• Improve architecture and performance by adding processes for making cleaner and more maintainable code. 

• Project-based performance reviews.

• Give back to the community - share & maintain some of our packages.

Global emissions from cloud computing range from 2.5% to 3.7% of all global greenhouse gas emissions (theshiftproject.org), thereby exceeding emissions from commercial flights (about 2.4%). We provide cloud hosting through 3rd party vendors for the majority of our clients. Our primary cloud service vendor platform.sh provides options to choose regions for each solution we host. Each region has an estimated g CO2/kWh. By changing the location for deployment from a high-carbon grid to a low-carbon grid, we can reduce our CO2 emission by up to 15x. (platform.sh).

We consider:

• Audit solutions to measure load time, identify bottlenecks, etc. to reduce data usage.

• Initiate talks with our hosting providers about powering down unused staging and development environments during off-hours (e.g. at night and public holidays)

 Our main aim 2024

• Significantly reduce our carbon intensity on our cloud hosting, with a target of 90% of solution on low-carbon grid by 2024 (3).