Carbon Calculator
Design
Virginia Nicholson
Animation
Lisa Kaiser
IBM Cloud’s Carbon Calculator helps businesses understand their true impact on the environment in their data and cloud usage with emission tracking built into every account. Cloud usage has an impactful footprint, contrary to common belief – Carbon Calculator is bringing that footprint to light so users can monitor, understand, and reduce their usage.
Our process
In order to create the IBM Cloud Carbon Calculator, we first conducted an audit of competitor, open source tools such as CloudCarbonFootprint.org and EPA data for calculating cloud-based carbon emissions to determine what was already available to our customers – and found very few equitable services in our direct competitors. After completing this market research, our team split into three different focuses: design research, UX design, and visual design. We worked in rapid vision sprints, each focus team tackling challenges within their own skillsets in order to solve our users pain points. Once we had prototypes designed that met stakeholders’ needs, we conducted user testing with customers to validate the designs and experience.
The design of the user experience of the IBM Cloud Carbon Calculator is built on Enterprise design thinking, a standard of IBM Design. This lead to carefully calculated user features, including simple discovery of the product from a dashboard widget on the main IBM Cloud landing page. An eye-catching target display guids the user to monitor the usage targets and ensure they stay on track, reducing their total emissions.
"The IBM Cloud Carbon Calculator is a new
milestone met”
IBM Cloud User feedback
Greenhouse-gas emissions generated by cloud account for about 2%–4% of the global total—a bigger carbon footprint than the aviation sector. And experts expect that number to rise with digitization and the rise of AI and machine learning technology. Researchers estimate that while data centers accounted for about 1% of global electricity demand in 2020, they could make up as much as 15%–30% of demand in some countries by 2030. Most consumers are completely unaware of how their data usage affects emissions and our climate – IBM Cloud Carbon Calculator brings their usage and data directly into their normal workstream in a clear and identifiable way, even offering exports for sharing of data. What’s more, IBM Cloud Carbon Calculator offers users a way to set targets and work towards emissions goals to reduce their data, offering easy to follow recommendations along the way. The more our users know, the more they can reduce their emissions, working towards a better future for us all.
