Tag: Global

Some staggering stats from Fastly showing how traffic and download speed have changed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Performance has quite literally never been more important.

Visits to news sites went up as much as 60%. And people are spending more time playing online games.

A similar pattern is emerging in the U.S. Cloudflare says Internet traffic jumped 20% on Friday, after President Trump declared the pandemic a national emergency. In hard-hit Seattle, Internet use was up 40% last week compared to January.

Latest data put out by the telecom regulator pegs the average monthly wireless data usage per user at 10.37 GB, which analysts say could rise by around 15% in the next two quarters if people continue to work from their homes over a prolonged period.

There are many ways we exclude people from using our sites: poor performance, poor accessibility and, as David Okwii points out, not considering other contexts when designing things as basic as a form:

Look at that form. It has fields like street address, state/province/region, apartment, zip code? What is that? I can only tell you that I live in Kanyanya, a Kampala suburb. If you need my exact home, then I’ll either have to send you a GPS location via apps like Whatsapp, Telegram, or Google Maps, or engage you in a long phone conversation in which I’ll try to describe landmarks, building and trees leading to my house. But street address, zip code? Hell no.

I can’t tell you how many times I have reached this step in shopping process and just froze. Several of my friends have had the same experience and yet this terrible form continues to be used by several upcoming online stores such as Rocket Internet’s Jumia. In the end, users just resign and simply buy stuff from the old-school brick-and-mortar stores.

A study from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows that “rich” teens use the web very differently from “poor” teens.

…richer teenagers were more likely to use the internet to search for information or to read news rather than to chat or play video games.

If you dig into the actual report itself you’ll find a bit more context.

After accounting for differences in the ability to read and understand printed texts, students’ socio-economic status has only a weak, and often not significant, relationship with performance in the PISA test of digital reading. In other words, students with good reading skills, regardless of their background, have a much easier time finding their way around—and mining the considerable assets of—the Internet.

Seems to echo many other reports about barriers to internet access in stating that literacy—whether digital or language—remains a significant obstacle.