Tim Frick

Tim started Mightybytes in early 1998 to help nonprofits, social enterprises, and purpose-driven companies solve problems, amplify their impact, and drive measurable business and marketing results.

Tim is a Certified Sustainability Designer through Gaia Education, a United Nations global education partner, where he co-facilitated their course on Economic Design. The course is part of the Design for Sustainability program, which helps students learn regenerative design and inclusive economic practices.

Tim has written four books, which have been translated into multiple languages and are used at educational institutions around the world:

Designing for Sustainability: A Guide to Building Greener Digital Products and Services from O’Reilly Media
Two editions of Return on Engagement: Content Strategy and Web Design Techniques for Digital Marketing from Elsevier/Focal Press
Managing Interactive Media Projects, an academic project management guide from Cengage Learning

In addition to authoring books, Tim has written for dozens of well-known publications, blogs, and media outlets. He recently contributed to the following projects:

The first-ever sustainability chapter of the HTTP Archive’s annual Web Almanac, a comprehensive report on the state of the web
A chapter in the Ecomm Manager’s Sustainable Ecommerce Handbook

Tim is also a regular contributor to B the Change, the storytelling platform for the global B Corp community.

Passionate about the growing global B Corp movement, Tim has co-founded and/or led several B Corp-related networks:

B Local Illinois
The B Corp Marketers Network
The B Proud Network

In 2013, Tim started a Sustainable Web Design community group at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). In 2023, this group introduced the Web Sustainability Guidelines to help organizations incorporate sustainability principles into the creation and management of digital products and services.

Finally, Tim is currently a board member at the Alliance for the Great Lakes and former Board President for Climate Ride.

Presentations

UX Camp Winter 2024

How New W3C Guidelines Could Impact UX Designers

Twenty years ago, the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) armed digital product teams with tools to improve how the web works for people with disabilities. In turn, these guidelines have influenced accessibility legislation in dozens of countries and measurably improved the web experience for the up to one billion people worldwide who identify as having some sort of physical or cognitive disability.

In late 2023, the first-ever Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSGs), produced by a W3C community group, aim to do the same for sustainability.

In this session, Tim Frick, co-chair of the W3C group and an editor of the WSG specification, will share how these 93 evidence-based guidelines can improve the social and environmental impacts of digital products and services we design and build.

The presentation will cover how UX designers can incorporate the WSGs into existing processes to:

Influence customer behavior to promote circularity and sustainability
Improve performance, efficiency, and accessibility
Reduce digital emissions, especially Scope 3
Prolong product lifespan and reduce e-waste
Align these efforts with existing sustainability reporting standards like GRI

We’ll also cover why these guidelines should exist under the umbrella of a web standards body like W3C and how that might influence future legislation, like the EU’s CSRD and California’s Climate Disclosure Regulations.

Our industry can’t effectively address big, wicked problems like climate change or social inequality without fundamentally changing how we design, develop, and manage digital products and services. This session will share some actionable takeaways on how UX designers can achieve this.