Charl van Niekerk » Blog: Minimalist Design in Africa

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Minimalist Design in Africa

This is quite an interesting one. Although the bandwidth in Botswana is actually not half bad, even in comparison to South African standards, it isn't really that great either compared to international standards. When you are designing websites and Africa is included in your target market, you typically want to keep page sizes minimal. For example, instead of using script.aculo.us you would rather use mootools (thanks for the tip, Stii).

What really confuses me therefore is the website of BTC, Botswana's state-owned telecommunication company. This is not how I personally would have approached the task.

The website homepage is basically covered with images and totals 113 KB. This is probably considered lightweight in comparison to international standards, but relative to African standards this is definitely quite heavy. From inside of Botswana, this actually loads extremely fast. But from South Africa a couple of weeks back, the speed was not that great. As a matter of fact, I was surprised as I waited about 10 minutes for the page to load. Although I suspect they were having temporary connectivity issues as pings also revealed bad packet loss. I would like to see how it loads after I get back to South Africa; am sure it'll be much better.

In Africa we are plagued with poor and unreliable connections, bad throughput, bandwidth shaping and traffic capping. Over here, simplicity, minimalism and efficiency rules. Actually, I would go as far as saying that your sites don't even need to look that pretty, as long as they load fast (although I guess this depends on the type of site). Although African internet is a real frustration at times, it is also a unique challenge that already passed long ago in other countries. I just wish some people will open their eyes and stop ignoring the situation. We have to be smart over here.

I know that Jacob Nielsen also recommends the minimalist approach, although he might be taking it a little too far. But the fact is that nobody wants to wait for pages to load. Are people really willing to wait longer for information, just to have it look pretty?

My solution (as a user) is normally to multitask. I have about 10 tabs open and while I wait for stuff to load I move between tabs and between my code editor, console, etc.

You can also make use of image and stylesheet caching. Images can be repeated for backgrounds. Why have that background image that gets repeated horizontally 10 pixels wide when it would achieve exactly the same effect if it was only 1 pixel wide?? Why insist on writing presentational markup with deprecated elements or style attributes all over the place when the formatting specification can be placed in a separate external stylesheet that can be included and cached? Why are so many people making use of internal stylesheets on production websites? I really don't catch it. We need to educate developers and people that really do care about quality.

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Minimalist Design in Africa

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