In honor of Earth Day, we went behind the scenes with Dan Whelan, UX Designer at HubSpot, who has committed to sustainability at home and at work. Take a look at the Q&A to learn about all the changes Dan has made in his life, how he thinks the UX team can contribute to our goals and his advice for HubSpotters.
Q: How did you become interested in sustainability?
I don’t know that there’s been any one point that I could look back to as the moment that sparked my interest in sustainability. It’s more like something that developed over time. I grew up in an urban area in Ireland, in an older part of my home town where the houses were old, poorly insulated and relied on coal or turf fires for heating. This produced a lot of smog, often tanking the air quality levels and causing my asthma to flare up. Renewable energy/heat sources and insulating older buildings could make such a difference on quality of life in urban areas.
Around 7 years ago, I came across a book called The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells. It’s not a book about the science of climate change, but rather what the effects are and will be in the future of our planet. It’s not particularly optimistic reading, I might even go as far as saying it’s a little grim, so be forewarned: the opening line of the book is “It is worse, much worse, than you think”. I think everyone should read this book. This book was a big driver in some of the changes I’ve made to be more sustainable.
Q: Tell me about some of the changes you’ve made in your life to be more sustainable.
- Energy and water: At home, we’ve installed an air-to-water heat pump, which takes heat from the air and uses that to heat water. It’s 3-4 times more efficient than a standard boiler. We also installed 15 solar panels on the roof of the house, for a 6kWp system. Working from home means I can use the energy that’s produced during the day and send any excess to my electric vehicle battery. We charge our electric vehicle at night once a week or trickle charge using excess energy from the solar panels during the day. Recently, we installed two solar batteries to compliment the solar panels. When the sun is shining, we are pretty much running off our own generated power.
A couple of years back we sealed off our chimney, installing an electric fire which improved the BER (efficiency) rating of the house from A3 to A1. And lastly, we installed a rainwater barrel at the back of the garden, attached to a downpipe on the shed. This catches rainwater that I can use to water the vegetables. We also wash our clothes at night when there is less demand on the energy network or during periods of excess solar generation. For paper towels, we’ve switched to a renewable and sustainable bamboo product. Bamboo is a grass and so trees don’t need to be cut down to make this paper!
- Waste: We are growing our own fruit and vegetables like tomatoes, carrots, potatoes and even strawberries. We started out using grow bags, but have recently begun installing raised beds in the garden. We also compost all of our food and garden waste and recycle as much as possible. Repairing and re-using broken furniture or electronics instead of buying new is a great way to repurpose items instead of diverting them to a landfill.
- Travel: Generally, we don’t take more than one trip abroad in a year. Travelling by air is a carbon intensive activity and reducing the number of plane journeys is one of the more impactful ways to lower our carbon footprint.
Q: How do you think your work on the User Experience team can support HubSpot’s sustainability goals?
When we think of sustainable living, finding efficiencies and removing redundancies is something to continually be working towards and improving. Efficiency in UX/design (and also, engineering) is highly desirable too. This is something that UX can influence in our work, particularly when it comes to designing the product.
In UX, we can refer to ‘Tesler’s Law’: the law of conservation of complexity. One of the key principles of Tesler’s Law is: “We should ensure as much as possible that the burden is lifted from users by dealing with inherent complexity during design and development.” Effectively, this means that if you can simplify, reduce unnecessary friction in the system or optimize the user’s flow any further, then you should.
Here’s an example: If you identify an area of unnecessary complexity in your software, a designer or engineer should hypothetically spend an extra week reducing the complexity of the software. Instead of making millions of users spend an extra minute using a complex program, a designer should spend the week simplifying the software.
In this example, that’s removed the need for thousands of wasted hours and excess energy usage. It also helps our customers to spend more of their valuable time on other tasks and ultimately, grow better!
Q: What’s one piece of advice you’d give to others looking to adopt a sustainable mindset?
There are many areas where we can have an impact and be more mindful of sustainable practices. Some are low cost and easy to implement, such as recycling or composting at home. Others have a higher barrier to entry, like installing solar panels, batteries or switching to an EV. So we have to look at what we can influence.
Take travelling, for instance! Travelling is something that almost everyone can enjoy – and I’m sorry – but it is also one of the more carbon intensive activities that we participate in (particularly air travel and cruises). To reduce your carbon footprint, consider taking less frequent trips by air, or scheduling longer trips to reduce the number of flights taken.
Happy Earth Month and thank you to Dan for sharing his journey to sustainable living!