Intriguing talk by Maciej Cegłowski on Website Obesity.
In the age of Netflix and youtube we take for granted that internet and data is free/unlimited for everyone. Actually that isn’t true at all. From where I come, data is very expensive given most of it is via the mobile phone and loading a 3mb site from the 1gb/month of data plan is just expensive and not to mention that it is sometimes painfully slow depending on my cellular service.
We don’t prioritise optimising the (bytes) size of our websites for those users who are from the developing countries where data might be at a premium.
User experiences are important, but not at the cost of your users. The talk is an eye opener for anyone who works in UX/Web experience. Do ponder for a moment if anything you create worthwhile needs to be resource heavy (dig at resource heavy apps Slack 🙂 )/costly. Cross platform and ease of development etc needs be considered yes, but taking the easy route always isn’t the right/best path for the longterm. Remember that there are a static/simple HTML sites still out there that still get the job done with out any issues.
The text version is here for your use if you wish not to view the video. Now back to working on how to reduce the size of my website. 🙂