Sustainable UX: Less Dopamine, More Impact

Sustainability in digital products is usually treated like an infrastructure problem. We talk about green hosting, carbon-neutral cloud providers, and image compression. While those are valid, most sustainability problems aren’t solved in the server room; they are solved in Figma. A massive chunk of digital waste is created long before a single line of code is shipped, rooted in attention waste, interaction waste, and unnecessary compute cycles.

Sustainable UX is not just a “vibe”—it’s a design discipline with two distinct sides. On one hand, you have human sustainability: designing interfaces that don’t exhaust or exploit the user’s brain. On the other, you have technical sustainability: designing products that don’t waste energy and hardware resources. When you combine them, you get a product that is high value and low waste.

Human Sustainability: Killing the Addiction Loops

The first side of Sustainable UX is purely human. A lot of modern UX is built on the question: “How do we get users to spend more time here?” This leads to notifications as bait, infinite scrolls acting like slot machines, and red dots screaming for attention. This isn’t engagement; it’s attention extraction. It creates cognitive overload and decision fatigue, leading to users who don’t just leave your app—they leave with resentment.

The cost of these dopamine loops is real. Resentful users don’t convert; they churn. This is where “Calm Technology” comes in—a concept that suggests technology should inform us without constantly demanding our focus. The goal isn’t to keep the user trapped in your app, but to help them complete their task so they can get back to their actual life.

A sustainable product designs attention as if it were a scarce and valuable resource. It nudges less but better, interrupts only when it truly matters, and avoids panic-inducing language. The irony is that the most sustainable products often reduce “time spent on site” because they are actually effective. High-impact UX is about being useful, not being a parasite on someone’s focus.

Technical Sustainability: Performance is Environmental

The second side is technical. Every screen you ship costs energy, from the device’s CPU and brightness to the network data transfer and server processing. Wasteful UX creates wasteful software. A heavy, over-engineered UI isn’t just a visual choice; it’s a performance and energy drain. In the world of green software, energy efficiency is a core responsibility.

We need to start treating performance as an environmental metric. Less data loaded equals less energy consumed. This means smaller bundles, optimized assets, and fewer background syncs. But the real UX unlock is reducing unnecessary interactions. If your interface forces a user through nine steps where three would suffice, you’re not just wasting their time—you’re wasting electricity.

Patterns That Work: From Batching to Disclosure

To make this practical, we need to look at patterns like ethical defaults. Defaults are powerful because they reduce cognitive load, but sustainable UX ensures they are transparent. No sneaky opt-ins or “Accept All” traps. Defaults should be used to reduce the work a user has to do, not to reduce their autonomy or trick them into sharing data they shouldn’t.

Batching is another sustainability superpower. Instead of firing off twelve micro-notifications throughout the day, send one digest or a single “what changed” update. This lets the user’s brain relax and significantly reduces the number of system wakes and API calls. Sustainable UX is fundamentally about fewer disruptions and more meaningful consolidated information.

Progressive disclosure is one of the cleanest forms of sustainability in design. By showing only the essential options upfront and revealing complexity only when necessary, you reduce visual noise and cognitive load. It’s a win-win: the interface uses fewer resources to render, and the user is less likely to get confused and bounce.

The AI Elephant in the Server Room

We can’t talk about sustainability without addressing the elephant in the server room: AI. AI growth is a massive driver of data center electricity demand. Every time we add an “AI rewrite” button or an “always-on” assistant “just because we can,” we are adding a significant energy footprint to our product. In Sustainable UX, AI must be treated as a high-cost resource, not a cheap gimmick.

The most common unsustainable AI patterns are “always-on” processes and “AI everywhere” buttons that users don’t actually need. Using a Large Language Model to perform a simple logic task is like using a flamethrower to light a candle. It’s overkill automation that adds cost and carbon without providing proportional user value.

Sustainable AI UX follows sanity rules: it should be on-demand, scoped to specific high-value tasks, and cached whenever possible. Don’t regenerate the same output ten times if you can store it. Treat every AI call as a budget item—both financially and energetically. If the UX can work without a complex inference call, it should.

Conclusion: Designing for Enough

Ultimately, Sustainable UX is just “grown-up” UX. It’s about moving past the “Wild West” of growth hacks and dopamine bait and moving toward products that respect attention, autonomy, and resources. It’s a shift from “more is better” to “enough is better.” A sustainable product doesn’t want to keep you trapped; it wants to help you succeed.

When you design for sustainability, you aren’t just being eco-friendly. You are building a more robust, faster, and more trustworthy product. You’re reducing support tickets, lowering churn, and making your tech stack more efficient. It’s better for the planet, sure—but more importantly for your business, it’s just excellent design.Mijn Top 3 voor Sustainable UX:

My Top 3 Advice for Sustainable UX:

1. Kill the Infinite Scroll Replace it with pagination or a clear “load more” button. Infinite scroll is a dopamine trap that keeps users mindless and servers working overtime. By adding a natural stopping point, you give the user back their autonomy and prevent loading megabytes of data that nobody is actually going to look at.
2. Audit your Notification Strategy for “Calmness” Before you fire off a push notification, ask: “Does this provide immediate value, or is it just noise?” Move away from constant pestering and toward batching. Providing a single, high-quality daily or weekly digest reduces cognitive load for the user and significantly cuts down on unnecessary server wakes and API calls.
3. Put your AI on a Strict Diet Stop putting an LLM behind every text box “just because.” If a simple filter, a few lines of RegEx, or a basic UI adjustment can solve the problem, do that instead. An AI call is an energy-intensive compute operation; treat it as a high-end tool for complex problems, not a shiny toy for basic tasks.