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It's what makes me wish designers and developers would work with artificial constraints. Sure, it's easy to design and develop without really thinking of bandwidth constraints, but reality is you are and will always be a better developer and designer by setting artificial bandwidth constraints in your mind and choices.

Seeking out or thinking as though you have bandwidth constraints can push you to find better solutions and thereby make your services better. The west and the tech centers in particular is really rather blinded by the glutinous bandwidth that keeps eating up greater and greater amounts of data with only marginal improvements in outcome or user experience.



I say this so much that I should probably just copy/paste it in the future but...

I used to work at a place that had a <1mbps modem, and a ~7 year old destkop. If their software didn't work on that, it needed to be optimized. I wish more places would test this way. Your sight may work fine in downtown SF, but that doesn't mean it's going to work well anywhere else.


Databases too. Hosting the database on a fast machine with a lot of RAM and an SSD will hide performance problems that should be immediately apparent.


With games, it's way easier to see problems in the profiler on the minimum spec PC than it is on your dev machine. Everything is magnified.


Chrome's Developer Tools has throttling options immediately available in the Network tab.


UX guy here. I've always kept performance in mind. One of my pet phrases is that speed is part of design.

I've gotten a lot of blank stares.

That's why more designers don't bother: decision makers usually respond only to look/flashiness/branding.




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