Slow Down!!!

I recently moved from the superbly able Internet of my office network (it was good enough for most surfing at least), to the more ancient dial-up connection at home. Yes, I know!!! There are still places in this world where broadband is not an option. Apparently broadband is not an option to places with less than X number of telephones. Yea… crazy but true.

The thing is though, in the heat of a decent internet connection it becomes really hard to understand what it means to be speed deprived. How “content rich”, and…. hi-tech, “jazzy”, “Flash-y” go flying out of the freakin door when the very basic content become difficult to deliver.

Imagine… capable laptops… but a connection incapable of running ANY messenger. Yahoo! Beta takes a life time to load… Gmail takes over 5 minutes to load… and even then the Gtalk within Gmail is intermenent… I had to start every conversation with a disclaimer “I am a dial-up… If I log off without notice… don’t mind… send me a mail I will respond.”

In such a situation, where do flashy-jazzy interfaces stand…?? What happens to rich content?? CSS, Ajax, flash based sites!!!?? What happens to e-commerce? Would you dare use the internet to pay your phone bill if you are not sure if the connection will hold… or if the loading time-outs???

Forget web applications/interfaces… what happens to our precious e-learning…??? What happens to the designed for “Dial-up” that comes along with the project requirements???

In a society that thrives in splitting up the haves and the have-nots… maybe we need to pay some attention to designing for the Lowest Common Denominator of our user bases… And I think we need to start by really experiencing what that means.