Every kilobyte is a cost: designing for the next hundred million customers
Lumio serves three million small traders on low-cost phones and patchy networks. Maya Okafor opens day two with what designing under real constraints can teach every product team.
- Thursday 10 June
- Day 2
- 09:30–10:15
- 45 minutes
- Main Stage
- Ground floor, hall A
- Keynote
- All levels
Most software is designed on a fast laptop, on a fast connection, by people who have never run out of data halfway through a payment. Lumio’s customers are market traders, pharmacists and tailors across West and North Africa. Many share a phone with family, pay for every megabyte, and serve customers while they use the app.
Maya opens the second day with what designing for them has taught her team, and why those lessons apply to every product, wherever its users live. She shares the research practice that puts designers in shops every quarter, the performance budget every feature has to fit inside, and the design decisions that came from watching people use Lumio while counting change.
Her argument is simple. Constraints are not an edge case to handle later. They are the clearest view you will ever get of what your product is actually for.
What you will take away
- How to set and enforce a performance budget that product and design both own
- Research methods for customers whose time and attention are scarce
- Design patterns for shared devices, intermittent connections and interrupted tasks
