User Tolerance as a Factor in Sustainable Website Design
G Everts, Arthi Padmanabhan · ACM SIGEnergy Energy Informatics Review · 2025
The internet is responsible for 3.7% of the world's carbon emissions, a number that is expected to increase. Websites alone are a notable aspect of the internet experience, but there are design choices that web developers can make to lower the carbon footprint of their websites. However, such changes often present a tradeoff between a lower carbon footprint and traditional quality of experience (QoE) metrics. In this work, we explore the type of QoE drop that users will tolerate to lower their carbon footprint through a case study. We built a browser extension to make energy efficient changes to a commonly used website, and we conducted user surveys. We found that users are more tolerant of QoE drops when they know the effect on carbon emissions; in fact, they more often preferred a version with lower QoE. We also asked users to customize the website according to their preferred tradeoff of QoE and emissions and we present insight into the variety of changes that users tolerated.