Not one aspect of our lives – personal, social, work – remains unaffected by the pandemic. Organisations scrambling to update – or even create – their digital products and services to adapt to the new, seemingly ever-changing, reality.   

Digital transformation was already forcing legacy organisations worldwide to compete on a new playing field. As of 2020, a staggering 44 of out of 50 top US banks was still operating on (IBM) mainframe, but new, more nimble entrants and the advent of AI started forcing them to look to the cloud…  

In 2022, the rule book has been ripped up. Digital is about helping organisations to work better, to be better. That means looking at the underlying global meta trends of sustainability, inclusion, privacy, innovation –and delivering them by a singular focus on user-centricity.  

Perfect is far too often the enemy of the good. Yes, we always scan the far horizon of what’s possible, whether that’s quantum chips, machine learning code or trust architecture. But if Covid-19 has taught us anything, it’s to act on the things now that can make the biggest impact. Inclusion, sustainability, privacy are all journeys we travel on, not a static singular destination. It is never too soon to embark on them. 

My team at Cyber-Duck has identified 7 Secrets to Digital Success that you can act on right now in 2022. And we are always here to help, today.  

Danny Bluestone  

Founder & CEO, Cyber-Duck  

What's Inside

  1. Digital Inclusion is Everything 

  2. Delivering Connection in a Hybrid Reality

  3. Privacy By Design 

  4. Sustainable by (Web) Design

  5. Agnostic, Open-Source, Agile

  6. Personalisation in Practice

  7. Happiness is Heuristics

1. Digital Inclusion is Everything 

It’s counterintuitive, given the transformational impact of the digital revolution for people with disabilities, that in many ways digital lags far behind the inclusive design of the physical environment.  

While the Gov.uk website has made huge strides in digital accessibility, it’s slightly ironic web pages setting out Statutory guidance on how buildings should accessible, only provides it in non-accessible PDFs (which we talk about the issues with here), the accessible format available only by email request… 

And for every technology like Siri that makes life better for people with a variety of accessibility and situational needs, some apparent advancements in tech are actively exclusionary. Digital touch screens in lifts and hotel rooms seem like a win for usability, but blind people are unable to use them as they do not have the braille which traditional buttons include, for example.  

So why is digital failing on this? Why are a staggering 94% of the global top-grossing e-commerce sites incompliant with basic accessibility requirements (1)? How did the global sports inclusion campaign #WeThe15 launch its website with basic accessibility flaws like missing image alt-tags and reliant on a quick fix overlay tool 

The answer is, of course, digital inclusion is made on the ground, within the organisations designing digital products and services. If users aren’t meaningfully included in the organisation’s decision making or research, designers can’t understand the real-world impacts of their designs.  

No written policy, however well-meaning and comprehensive, can replace lived insight into the many intersecting barriers to inclusion that exist, whether neurodiversity, economic marginalisation, fluency in English or just a lack of digital skills.  

Covid-19’s almost overnight shift to remote working and virtual events that allowed people to participate more easily, showed just what was possible to narrow the digital divide, if organisations actually wanted to. A new generation of users simply expects better, led by powerful campaigns like Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and #A11y finding expression in apps like TikTok. Itself now offering editable auto captions as a standard feature, after feedback from the Deaf community.  

By comparison, many organisations and their legacy websites seem decades behind. While regulation requires public sector websites to be WCAG compliant, true digital inclusion benefits every organisation’s bottom line and brand reputation simply by doing the right thing.  

In 2022, we can all do digital inclusion better. 

Why you should act  

  • The cultural tide is firmly turning in favour of inclusion. BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing 2021 final featured Deaf actress Rose Ayling-Ellis and an all-male couple; leading online retailer ASOS a model with a cochlear implant showing of earrings, no fuss. Menopause, miscarriage and pregnancy policies are also starting to go mainstream. Not keeping up is not an option. 
  • Governmental bodies are also focusing on inclusion. In the US, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) included $42.5bn to the Broadband Equity and Deployment program and $2.75 billion for the Digital Equity Act (2). In the EU, The European Accessibility Act requires key digital tools, products, and services to be accessible by 2025, including in the private sector, such as e-commerce, online banking, TV platforms, smartphones, websites and booking systems of transport services (3). A huge challenge and opportunity.  
  • While digital inclusion is simply the right thing to do, the economic costs of failing to engage with diverse audiences are colossal. Purple Tuesday, the disability awareness day and campaign found that inaccessible websites cost retailers and other UK businesses more than £411bn during the pandemic due to 54% of those who had difficulties using websites then abandoned their plans to spend money entirely (4). 
  • The reputational fall out from inclusion failures can be headline grabbing – and costly. In 2021, Israeli Energy Minister Karine Elharrar was unable to attend the COP26 climate conference because of a lack of wheelchair access. And Uber was fined $1.1m by a Blind woman after she was refused service or abused by drivers on 14 separate occasion. Uber themselves being sued by the US Justice Department for charging disabled users a penalty for not getting into vehicles within their 2-minute wait limit. 

What you can do in 2022:  

Be the change you want to see. Look honesty at your organisation, your users and listen to them about their needs and wishes. See where there are any shortfalls and create policies and processes to ensure user-centred design is at the forefront. We’re here to help with digital inclusion every step of the way.  

Visit: https://www.cyber-duck.co.uk/what-we-do/research-and-strategy/accessibility  

2. Delivering Connection in a Hybrid Reality

Two years into the Covid-19 pandemic, the world of work (and everything else for that matter) is profoundly different.  

Even before Omicron hit sending people back to working from home, less than a third of London and New York office workers were at their desks despite working-from-home restrictions being lifted (5) (6). The number of global airline flights barely over half the pre-pandemic peak (7).  And even when there was optimism about normality returning in summer 2021, many people were still reluctant to attend live events like concerts and sporting fixtures (8).  

What’s clear is the continuing uncertainty over Covid-19 puts up both practical and psychological barriers to people being together. Not to mention, workers relishing the better work-life balance and productivity they have by not commuting to the office every day and the sustainability benefits of less travel. 

Hybrid looks set to stay even when Covid-19 recedes as a threat. Organisations must retool themselves with the right processes and digital systems to have the agility and flexibility to adapt to constantly changing circumstances. We’ve integrated tools like Miro, ClickUp and Slack; designed remote user research and design sprints for our clients. And found immersive tech like Owl Labs that provide 360 interactive remote experiences and continually look to improve. 

But tech currently only goes so far. VR and AR plays a functional role in engineering, surgery and certain types of learning, but the type of ‘mixed reality’ offered by Microsoft’s Mesh cannot yet replace the serendipity and ‘spark’ fuelling creativity and transformation of in-person meetings.  

Delivering hybrid is tricky, but It all comes down to user-centred design in the end. Strategically understanding what user experiences can be remote and augmented with the right digital tools, and what still needs in-person interaction.  

Why you should act now

  • Workers have fundamentally changed their attitude to work practices. A JP Morgan study found more than 80% of London office employees rated working full time from home or from the office as their least preferred options. EY’s Work Reimagined research found nine in ten employees want continued work flexibility, with more than half of employees considering quitting their jobs if post-pandemic flexibility is not given. 
  • Where Google goes, others follow. Alphabet, Google’s parent company has permanently adopted a ‘three days in the office/two days from home’ working model, debuting a new meeting room called Campfire. In-person attendees sit in a circle interspersed with screens showing faces of people dialing-in as if they are in the same space. Keeping talent will mean keeping up.  
  • One of the advantages of in-person is the ability to ‘just ask that quick question’ of a colleague. And serious amounts of frustration and productivity loss - 58% of office workers surveyed by Wakefield Research said searching for files and documents is a "top-three problem”’ - are produced by not having the right intranet or systems in place (9). 
  • A survey of B2B marketers found that 45% said in-person events would not be a large part of their business strategy in the coming year and 47% would send fewer people to them (10). Ensuring your organisation can meet its audiences – whoever and wherever they are – requires a robust digital strategy for internal and external content and communication. 

What you can do in 2022:  

Give your organisation’s user journeys – both internal or external - a 360° healthcheck. Where can they be eased, unblocked or improved? What kind of tools do you have in place to enable your organisation to work in the new hybrid reality? Cyber-Duck can help – our ISO-accredited user-centred design approach is proven to deliver high quality, flexible, effective experiences and we’ve been remoted-enabled since 2016. 

Download: https://www.cyber-duck.co.uk/insights/resources/strategic-ux-remote-first-design-sprints  

3. Privacy By Design 

With online consumption the new normal, businesses are collecting, accessing, and using greater amounts of user and customer data. And with it, a growing demand (both legally and socially) for businesses to deliver robust and compliant data protection.   

Starting in 2022, we will see major changes in global data privacy laws across the world. In the UK, the government is planning to divert from the European Union’s GDPR (following Brexit) towards new Data Protection Laws. This has been described by former Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden, as an opportunity to “pursue a new era of data-driven growth and innovation” and a move towards ‘common-sense’ laws, as opposed to ‘box-ticking’.   

Changes are also happening in the United States. Whilst the U.S. does not have all-encompassing data privacy law, the California Privacy Rights and Enforcement Act (CPRA) has influenced many States to bring in more stringent data privacy rights: in Virginia (the Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act (VCDPA)) and Colorado (the Colorado Privacy Act (CoPA)) to come into practice in the next 2 - 4 years. More are likely to follow.  

Consequently, many international businesses have to walk a fine line between the slight variations of data privacy regulations and laws. Best practice would be to align with the stricter and robust EU GDPR, to avoid any legal action. But this may not be enough.   

Establishing a Privacy by Design strategy can help you build privacy into your operations and management of a given system, business process, or design specification – ensuring data privacy and security through every touchpoint of the data lifecycle. Embedding Anna Cavoukian’s seven core principles within your business can help you build the foundation of a data strategy that goes beyond ‘satisfactory’ privacy practices and standards and ensure compliance across various regional laws.   

Why you should act

  • Breaking data privacy laws could get you fined. And not with pocket change. Companies including H&M, Google, British Airways, Vodafone and Marriot have shelled out tens of millions for breaching the EU’s GDPR laws (11). 2021 saw the two largest fines to date, with Amazon hit with a €746 million (£636m) fine, and WhatsApp forced to pay out €225M (£193m).   
  • More data privacy laws are coming into action. According to Gartner, by 2023 65% of the world’s population will have their personal data covered under a regional and/or global privacy regulation. International businesses need to be proactive and forward-looking looking in any country they operate within (12).  
  • A major data privacy lawsuit or breach spells bad things for any business. A survey conducted by Okta and YouGov found that 88% of customers wouldn’t use a service or purchase products from a company they distrust, with 39% saying they would lose trust in a company due to a data breach or misuse of data. A stark reminder ‘slip-ups' can cost you your customer base (13).    
  • The ‘Cookieless Future’ isn’t a buzz term, but something that we all must prepare for. Google has planned to phase out third-party cookies by the end of 2023. This is going to force us all to rethink how we advertise online, and shift towards a positive way of collecting first-party data.  

What you can do in 2022 

What underpins all this? Trust. Between a business, their consumers and the products and services those consumers invest in. Cyber-Duck is here to help organisations build and maintain that trust. We can design and enable data collection, processing, sharing and storage that’s done responsibly, with a robust process, secure technology and strong data governance. Ask us how, today. 

Download: https://www.cyber-duck.co.uk/insights/resources/gdpr-checklist 

4. Sustainable by (Web) Design

Sustainability means a resilient, prosperous, and inclusive global society that doesn’t damage the planet. In 2021, it became frighteningly evident that we have.

We saw an unprecedented level of extreme weather events: rain on Greenland’s ice sheet, a record cold wave in southern USA and 20cm of rain falling within a single hour in Henan, China (14). Climate change is here.

At the landmark UN COP26 climate summit, nearly 200 countries signed the Glasgow Climate Pact to reduce emissions by 45% by 2030 compared to 2010 levels.

For those of us in digital, that challenge is enormous. ICT accounts for at least 2% of global carbon emissions (15) – more than aviation and the 7th largest producer if it were a country – also making huge demands on scarce water supplies (16) and other natural resources.

Big Tech is acting. Google has been carbon neutral since 2007 and last year they announced its entire ecosystem will be carbon free by 2030, by harnessing ‘next-generation geothermal energy or ‘carbon-intelligent computing’. With their scale and footprint, Google have a mammoth task ahead, but the budgets and resource to make it achievable.

But for those of us without Google’s resources, what can we do within the digital industry to reduce our environmental impact?

Two areas are within our control: how we act within our organisations and the type of products we design.

That requires looking at our operations, measuring environmental impacts and setting measurable targets to reduce them. It means assessing the whole UX web design and build process to identify where we can achieve sustainability wins and integrate it into business as usual. Even simple fixes like optimising image sizes, optimising code and make the user experience (UX) faster, can drastically reduce load times and so website data and energy usage. Read our thinking on how good UX can deliver sustainability improvements here.

While there are sadly no silver bullets, there are plenty of small, cumulative ways to reduce digital carbon emissions that can – and should – be done. Today.

Why you should act now

  • With Google now making wide-reaching changes to its services (17) to help people make more sustainable choices, such as prioritising search results for eco-friendly information and products and ensuring Maps offers carbon-optimised journeys, how long will it be before search itself ranks sustainably designed websites higher?
  • Around two-thirds of consumers support mandatory carbon labelling on products, to make it easier for them to achieve the more sustainable lifestyles they desire (18). Savvy digital businesses can now demonstrate their sustainable bona fides with badges from the Green Web Foundation and WebsiteCarbon and it’s likely to become ubiquitous.
  • The business case for organisations to deliver – and evidence – carbon mitigation policies is particularly compelling for those listed on the stock exchange or relying on external investment. A slew of regulatory initiatives has been introduced requiring asset managers to incorporate climate related risks into their investment decision making (19).
  • Regulation is also starting to bite from the government side. From April 2022, the UK's largest companies are required to report on climate-related risks, including digital (20). France has passed strict legislation to reduce digital’s environmental impact (21). More countries are likely to follow.
  • The public sector is already setting the tone. NHS Digital has pledged to achieve sustainable digital services - including sustainable cloud hosting arrangements – and a net zero NHS Carbon Footprint by 2040, with an 80% emissions reduction by 2028 to 2032 (22).

What you can do in 2022

Commit to putting sustainability at the heart of your business and digital transformation planning. Cyber-Duck is going through the process of ISO 14001:2015 accreditation and becoming a B-Corp. We’ll be sharing the learnings of our own sustainability journey and we’re always here to help others do the same.

Visit: https://www.cyber-duck.co.uk/insights/how-sustainable-design-can-help-climate-change

5. Agnostic, Open-Source, Agile

Covid-19 forced organisations to adopt or adapt digital products to an entirely new way of doing things. Whether understanding how to amp up ecommerce offerings, support remote and hybrid working, or delivering traditionally in-person services online. Requiring speed and agility from marketers and designers to do it achieve it successfully - and robustly. In addition to excellent processes, it made the right choice of tech stack vital. Everything a web owner wants to achieve - personalisation, CRM data exchange, CMS integration, compliance with Infosec policy or GDPR - rests on using the right solution for each unique challenge.

And even though many products were delivered at speed during Covid, there is always the underlying long-term goal of usability, scalability, security, and sustainability.

No product owner in 2022 wants a website that limits their future business goals, has poor up-time or is obsolete in a matter of years. It must be able to grow with new customers, functionalities, and geographic territories it might expand to and – critically – do it while being secure.

We believe in 2022 – when the complexity of what organisations want to achieve with their digital platforms grows almost exponentially - the answer rests on being technology agnostic, open-source and agile.

Being cloud agnostic lets product owners comply with infosec requirements without slowing down web development. Being framework agnostic means when we needed to develop a standalone website for Sport England in just six days, we were able to go for the solution we felt would work best, no restrictions.

Using open-source (OSS) technology means you don’t have to worry about licence fees when adding more users, new microsites and more plugins as your scale and strategy grows. The code belongs to you and is not locked into a 3rd party proprietary system; backed by collaborative communities of tens of millions of developers, continually co-creating and improving code.

Using agile methodology, means you can constantly reiterate, identify problems as they occur and fix them. It is impossible to strictly plan for every task over a website project, you need a robust road map, but you also have to be able to respond to changing external realities and requirements as they arise. A lesson that Covid-19 has taught us all!

This doesn’t mean no preferences. But it’s always on a case-by-case basis. Because there are no static, one-size-fits all tech solutions in 2022.

Why you should act

Policy makers are betting heavily on open source as a path to digital transformation. A September 2021 report published by the European Commission (23) recommended that setting up a European network of governmental units dedicated to accelerating the use of OSS and that the 2021-2027 €95.5 billion budget of the Horizon Europe program be used to fund “open source support mechanisms and projects”, estimating if OSS contributions increased by 10% in the EU, they would generate an additional 0.4% to 0.6% (around €100 billion) to the bloc’s GDP.

In the corporate sector, non-OSS companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are now among the biggest contributors to the 56-million-strong GIthub OSS platform, underscoring its strategic importance. In October 2021, when Microsoft quietly removed a key part of Hot Reload in the upcoming release of .NET 6 (a feature allowing developers to get instant feedback when creating a project and changing code to immediately see results) limiting it to proprietary Windows and Visual Studio developers, the backlash was immediate. And Microsoft quickly publicly backtracked its decision, showing the power of the OSS community (24).

According to Gartner, global spending on cloud services is expected to reach over $482 billion in 2022, up from $313 billion in 2020, underpinning its importance to digital services, from gamer streaming to the internet of things (IoT) (25). Upcoming ultra-fast networks like 5G and Wi-Fi 6E will also change what type of data can be streamed. With cloud services increasingly commoditised, being able to pick and chose to your developing organisational needs is essential.

What you can do in 2022  

Review your tech stack and project against your organisational strategy. Will it enable you to achieve your strategic goals or is it holding you back? Are you trapped into restrictive and expensive licensing agreements that make it hard for you to respond to changing user needs? With a xx% customer satisfaction rate, Cyber-Duck can help you implement strategies, service design, technology and optimisation that delivers digital transformation – and results. 

Visit: https://www.cyber-duck.co.uk/what-we-do/technology-implementation  

6. Personalisation in Practice

Some of the world’s most beloved companies like Netflix and Spotify, are built on hyper-targeted personalisation. Using thousands of microsegments and advanced machine learning to serving up content suited to the time of day and mood and even the artwork to match it.  

But for every fantastic, friction-free user experience, there are untold millions of digital products that have no idea you’ve used them before, make you re-enter the same information into a form every time you use them or where your app customer profile simply doesn’t sync with the web version. The gulf – and the need to bridge it – is vast. 

Consumers want personalisation. Comprehensive research into the topic finds more than 7 in 10 consumers it, and nearly 8 in 10 are more likely to purchase – and repurchase – from brands that personalise and more likely to recommend to friends and family (26). And personalisation-focused companies have better customer outcomes and far higher revenue growth than those who don’t.  

So if the case for digital personalisation is so clear, why are so many organisations not even attempting it?  

One reason is the ‘acceptability gap’. People are more accepting of personalised services than they are the collection of personal data required to generate them (27). Making personalisation ‘creepy’  – making users feel they’re being spied on or having the intimate areas of their lives analysed, not with their best interests in mind – makes it a minefield that many organisations are understandably reluctant to stray into.  

Another aspect is the organisational challenge, whether strategic, human or technological, to take advantage of the personalisation’s benefits across the customer life cycle. What makes sense to personalise for the organisation, how can it deliver value to the user and the organisation and how can it be practically managed within the existing tech stack..? 

But given the gap between innovators like Netflix and most organisations is so vast, just starting to bridge it doesn’t necessarily require a fundamental organisation or tech overhaul. Small, iterative steps can be taken that make a huge difference to customer experience, without straying onto the minefield, using cost-effective solutions like Acquia Lift, a no-code optimisation engine delivering personalized customer experiences in real-time for websites built on Drupal’s CMS.   

Using personalisation well can be to an organisation’s huge advantage and can – and must be – implemented today.  

Why you should act now 

  • Business schools are incorporating personalisation into their offerings. The Wharton School’s AI for Business initiative includes a specialised course on how to personalise customer experiences, AI for Business Specialisation, as does Harvard and Oxford’s Saïd Business School and many others. Legacy organisations without these skillsets will struggle to deliver on user expectations.  
  • Consumers expectations from technology personalisation only look set to increase. Tech giant Samsung made personalization its key theme at the Consumer Electronics Show 2022 (28), referencing “A new, customizable future of personal technologies…reflecting your lifestyle, your passions and your personal tastes, from the smartphones in your hand to your appliances and screens.”  
  • Counterintuitively, the cookieless future might speed up the pace of personalisation as organisations focus on a first-party data strategy. Combined with appropriate technological infrastructure, such as a comprehensive customer data platform (CDP), this can give organisations a deeper view of their customers. If that deeper view can be leveraged with a focus on transparency, privacy and consent, users can be provided with the engagement and functionality that they desire, without the current ‘chased across the internet’ feeling too many experience now.  
  • While technology can do a lot of the thinking, it can’t reproduce the human aspect of relationships. Deloitte finds three-quarters of global executives surveyed say they will invest more in explicitly integrated, hybrid experiences in 2022, with the goals of improving personalisation, customer connection and inclusive experiences (29). And they’ll do it by using human-centered design principles.   

What you can do in 2022:  

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. Personalisation doesn’t have to mean the wholesale adoption of advanced machine learning capability and AI analytics; it can be about making your current website iteratively better with cost-effective, no-code solutions. Understanding what personalisation your users want and what they don’t is as must.  

Download: https://www.cyber-duck.co.uk/insights/resources/ux-handbook  

7. Happiness is Heuristics  

In recent years, companies are investing more and more into UX. The major players in the tech world understand the importance of user experience, with Google launching its UX Design Certificate on Coursera in 2021 (30). Great visuals simply aren’t enough; providing an excellent user experience is becoming more and more crucial to stay ahead of competitors in 2022.  

There are many techniques in UX design, with user research and usability testing remaining cornerstones of creating a great user experience. Heuristic evaluation is one of the many tools you should add to your UX arsenal. The process involves evaluators using a set of universally-accepted design principles, known as heuristics, to review an interface design. Studies have shown that following certain heuristics can reduce the user’s cognitive load when fulfilling certain tasks, therefore improving the user experience. By asking ourselves “does this design fulfil this heuristic?” we can filter out usability issues at an early stage.  

The most well known and widely-used set of heuristics were defined by Jakob Nielsen in 1994, and are still relevant today. However, there are many potential heuristics which you can use in your evaluation process. Cyber-Duck’s Heurix tool covers a diverse range of design considerations, from first impressions to site navigation, interaction and much more.  

Heuristic analysis can help you to identify and fix potential usability issues before getting to the point of usability testing, allowing you to spend that stage identifying more specific action points. However, heuristics can be referred to at any stage of the design and build process to check that you’re on the right track.   

Why you should act now 

  • Investing in UX is crucial to stay ahead of the competition. Major companies like Amazon and Netflix already have processes in place to monitor customer satisfaction, because they recognise a quality user experience is key to generating a higher ROI. Recent academic research cements this truth, finding that websites that can achieve user online flow state (losing themselves in the moment, through ease and enjoyability) help build better customer loyalty and satisfaction through improved total brand experience.  
  • Many organisations are facing severe downward pressures on marketing budgets, including digital. According to Gartner budgets falling to their lowest recorded level of 6.4% of company revenue in 2021 from 11% in 2020 (31). Finding new cost-effective techniques to increase brand loyalty, conversion rates and other KPIs is vital. Here, heuristic evaluation can play a powerful role, without requiring an entire web redesign project.  
  • Heuristic evaluation isn’t only beneficial for external users and their satisfaction but also for streamlining any UX team’s working process. The evaluation can be carried out using in-house resources before getting to the point of testing with real users, saving time, money and resources.  

What you can do in 2022 

Get in touch with Cyber-Duck for a free heuristic evaluation and user experience audit. We will help you to identify key areas where you can make improvements, giving your users a better experience and increasing your potential ROI. 

Visit: https://www.heurix.io 

Email: info@cyber-duck.co.uk   

7 Secrets to Digital Success Contributors

  • Danny Bluestone 
  • Matt Gibson 
  • Sam Hooper 
  • Chandeep Khosa 
  • Meera Rao 
  • Sylvain Reiter 
  • Yahye Siyad 
  • Vanessa Strydom 

References

  1. Baymard. “E-Commerce Accessibility Research Study.” 29 June 2021, https://baymard.com/research/accessibility  
  2. Perkins Coie. “How the New Infrastructure Act Aims to Bridge the Digital Divide.” 11 November 2021, https://www.perkinscoie.com/en/news-insights/how-the-new-infrastructure-act-aims-to-bridge-the-digital-divide.html  
  3. Shaping Europe’s Digital future European Commission. “Digital Economy and Society Index 2021: overall progress in digital transition but need for new EU-wide efforts.” 19 May 2021, https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/global-accessibility-awareness-day-european-commission-working-towards-inclusion-all  
  4. Internet Retailing. “Inaccessible websites cost retailers and UK businesses more than £411bn during the pandemic: Purple Tuesday research.” 2 November 2021, https://internetretailing.net/customer/customer/inaccessible-websites-cost-retailers-and-uk-businesses-more-than-411bn-during-the-pandemic-purple-tuesday-research-23946 
  5. City AM. “London offices at 10 per cent occupancy after work from home directive.” 15 December 2021, https://www.cityam.com/london-offices-at-10-per-cent-occupancy-after-work-from-home-directive/  
  6. Partnership for New York City. “Return to Office Results Released – November.” 10 November 2021, https://pfnyc.org/news/return-to-office-results-released-november/  
  7. Finances Online. “Number of Flights Worldwide in 2021/2022: Passenger Traffic, Behaviors, and Revenue.” Accessed 11 January 2022, https://financesonline.com/number-of-flights-worldwide/  
  8. YouGov. “Post-lockdown, are people comfortable attending in-person concerts?” 1 July 2021, https://yougov.co.uk/topics/entertainment/articles-reports/2021/07/01/post-lockdown-are-people-comfortable-attending-per  
  9. Tech Republic. “More than 50% of office pros spend more time searching for files than on work.” 18 May 2021, https://www.techrepublic.com/article/more-than-50-of-office-pros-spend-more-time-searching-for-files-than-on-work/  
  10. SmartBrief. “The future of events: B2B marketers weigh in-person vs. virtual attendance.” 13 October 2021, https://www.smartbrief.com/original/2021/10/future-events-b2b-marketers-weigh-person-vs-virtual-attendance  
  11. Enforcement Tracker. “GDPR Enforcement Tracker.” Accessed 12 January 2021, https://www.enforcementtracker.com  
  12. Gartner. “Gartner Says By 2023, 65% of the World’s Population Will Have Its Personal Data Covered Under Modern Privacy Regulations.” 14 September 2020,  https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2020-09-14-gartner-says-by-2023--65--of-the-world-s-population-w 
  13. UK Tech News. “Digital trust in businesses remains fragile as UK consumers increasingly aware of data misuse.” 16 February 2021, https://uktechnews.co.uk/2021/02/16/digital-trust-in-businesses-remains-fragile-as-uk-consumers-increasingly-aware-of-data-misuse/ 
  14. BBC. “Climate change: Extreme weather events are 'the new norm'.” 31 October 2021, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-59105963  
  15. Lancaster University. “Emissions from computing and ICT could be worse than previously thought.” 10 September 2021, https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/news/emissions-from-computing-and-ict-could-be-worse-than-previously-thought 
  16. Computer Weekly. “Climate change and datacentres: Weighing up water use.” 20 September 2021, https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Climate-change-and-datacentres-Weighing-up-water-use 
  17. The Verge. “Google launches new features to help users shrink their carbon footprints.” 6 October 2021, https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/6/22711623/google-climate-change-greenhouse-gas-emissions-carbon-footprint-maps-search-travel  
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