Designing for a 3G afternoon
Bandwidth in Addis is not a constraint you handle once. Building Ahoon Studies for university students changed how we treat media, forms and first paint on every project since.
Lattice started in 2018 with education. Ahoon Studies gives Ethiopian university students video lessons and practice quizzes on their phones, and it taught us something no performance budget document had: connectivity is not slow, it is unreliable, and those need different designs.
Slow versus unreliable
A slow connection is a throughput problem you solve with smaller payloads. An unreliable one is a state problem: the request will fail halfway, on the fourth attempt, after the user has already committed to something. The second one is what actually breaks products in this market.
What we changed
The habit it left us with
We now ask, in the first week of any build, what the worst network our users will be on looks like — and we test on it rather than on a throttled desktop profile. It has quietly improved products for clients in Portland as much as for students in Addis.
Building for a hard network?
Tell us the conditions your users are actually on. It changes the architecture, and it is cheaper to decide now than to retrofit.
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