I have a good Internet connection into my home here in the United States (I telecommute from a home office) but I also have 4 kids. The older two have graduated to streaming video to their laptops, but the younger two still prefer choosing titles from Netflix.
When they're all streaming video, I find have the exact same problem on a desktop with plenty of resources. I think Stephanie's message should be applied several ways. We should degrade gently for underpowered devices like phones, but we should also be cognizant of the network capacity of the user.
Coming from the embedded systems world, I know what it is to count every clock cycle and every byte of RAM. I need to remember those techniques when I'm designing and implementing web applications. Thanks Stephanie!
Yes, Google Maps interface comes to mind every time I get reminded about this issue: "Still loading? Use the basic HTML version or click here for help"
Although I wonder if this really is the best solution.
Problems:
User has to explicitly select a change.
Once you change it might go faster, but it's no guarantee and makes you wait a longer total time to get to the first complete view.
Benefits:
It does not depend on directly measuring bandwidth (wasteful and still would take longer)
Relays information about the problem to the user and not just a bad experience.
Although, short of dynamic loading of less intensive interfaces until it ends up rendering a "basic HTML" view, I fail to see one. I haven't seen this implemented though.
I wrote a bit about this [1]. The basic idea is that CSS media queries, which currently just let us know about screen sizes, should also give us otherwise information like network latency and CPU
When they're all streaming video, I find have the exact same problem on a desktop with plenty of resources. I think Stephanie's message should be applied several ways. We should degrade gently for underpowered devices like phones, but we should also be cognizant of the network capacity of the user.
Coming from the embedded systems world, I know what it is to count every clock cycle and every byte of RAM. I need to remember those techniques when I'm designing and implementing web applications. Thanks Stephanie!