Every talk you’ll hear about ‘web performance’ will tell you that shaving 100ms from response time produced a 1% sales yield for Amazon, or maybe that 40% of web visitors will abandon your site when it takes more then 3 seconds to load? While those are impressive, there are some more interesting metrics that we need to talk about.

Did you know that 43% of the humans on this planet have access to the internet, but 57% do not? Did you know that in 2016 India brought 100 million NEW users to the internet for the very first time? When you take a glance into the current state of global connectivity, you might realise that the internet you think you know so well exists on an entirely different plane.

Through the guise of user-experience and empathy, we’ll study the state of global connectivity, connection speeds, population, and the costs of data in order to re-centre how we think about our role as designers and developers for the web today.