Intro

The local environment can influence both the way people act and overall business processes. A key factor is the technology infrastructure, especially network connectivity and power outages. Both can have a decisive impact on the user experience and need to be considered during the UX design process.

Network Connectivity

Network connectivity can vary greatly across the world. Some regions might have no connectivity at all. In others, connectivity might be severely limited.

Example: India

Because of poor bandwidth, pages with heavy graphics, icons, photographs, or large amounts of data in tables cost time and money. If a page takes up to 5 minutes to load and consumes 2 MB or even more, it is likely that the user will find a workaround to avoid using that specific web page or app. In this case, performance optimization is key to a smooth user experience.

Design Options

• Minimize the size of your application to allow for limited network capabilities:

  • Think about which controls will actually be used and avoid loading unnecessary controls
  • Use variant management to avoid loading large amounts of data when an application is opened. Only load data when a variant is chosen.
  • Avoid pictures.
  • Use a tab bar instead of an anchor bar.

• Offer both an online and an offline mode.

Power Outages

Power outages happen all over the world, but some regions experience regular power outages, including California in the US, regions in Mainland China (especially in summer), and some regions in India.

Design Options

• Offer both an online and an offline mode.
• Offer a draft mode, especially for collaboration scenarios.
• Consider adapting business processes to work with different or potentially broken throughput/process times.
• Offer an option to export to Microsoft Excel. Because Microsoft Excel supports an offline save, many business users in India save their data to Excel several times a day to avoid losing data through power outages.