The choice to be disconnected
A call to action to build tech that works well offline and with slow internet speeds, or learning to stop worrying and meander through the green belt.
After a multi-leg train ride from Heathrow Airport, I was somewhere in the southwest of England waiting for a good friend to pick me up. I mistakenly took a pricier express train and was 45 minutes early, hoping Kristina had gotten my text. I hadn’t heard from her all morning, but I lucked out. I learned by chance she stepped out to check her text messages at a specific spot on the street. Kristina, her wife, Sarah, and her terrier pup, Lila, moved to this speck on the map for many reasons, one being a reset from city and work life after the pandemic.
I listened to the click-clack of horse hooves on cobblestones while watching some teenagers aboard a tractor drinking as one of them drove to the pub. It felt so otherworldly, light-years from our dual-monitor home offices in a fourth floor walk-up with a video doorbell monitoring the surrounding area or to the local Starbucks where our smartphones talk to smart cash registers to redeem a free coffee. In cities and suburbia, tech is inescapable and pervasive. Does rural life — so distant from ours — need access to technology as someone living in the big city?
Kristina yelled at Lila, “Don’t eat sheep poop!” The dog responded by pulling harder on the leash. The four of us strolled along a public path that traversed through a farm, woods, and grazing land, avoiding stinging nettles as we passed thigh-high grass, hedgerows, sheep, scampering quail, cows, the occasional human, and wild pheasants struggling to keep their distance from the terrier. We made our way to the top of a hill overlooking the town of Wiveliscombe (pronounced Wiv-el-is-cum) with a population south of 3,000. Pondering life with one of my best friends, we paused to admire our surroundings. I slid my phone out of my pocket — noticing my pants were splattered with brick red mud — and snap, snap, snap, I digitized the vista, opening Instagram without thought to get some likes. I quickly realized I was barless! Kris turned to me and said, “No service out here.” Without a choice, I quickly adapted to the limited tether and enjoyed the rest of our nature walks without the likes.
The question still remains: Why disrupt such tranquility with better access to tech?
One of my guiding principles in accessibility is “everything should be accessible. Don’t limit access to impose morals.” Accessibility is about choice. The example I always use is the soda vending machine. Should the vending machine be accessible? Someone could argue soda is bad, why make it easier to drink? If that’s the case, do it through laws, not by imposing your morals through lack of accessibility.
The case to build tech that loads fast with slow internet, and functions offline is the same. Access to tech in rural areas can mean checking for directions while meandering in the woods, calling for help where no people are within earshot, or a farmer at the market completing a digital transaction. Access to technology is about choice, and making tech work in rural areas is one more facet of accessibility.
Even potential pitfalls, like the unending itch to get likes or doomscrolling should not be used as an excuse to deny access to the technology (it’s a whole other problem that could be attacked using more thoughtful design, but that’s a topic for another blog post.)
On a side note, cutting-edge solutions like Starlink (satellite internet) will help to bridge our worlds, but it won’t solve the problem of a lack of high-speed internet or tech that is usable offline.
Our company data shows that one of the most used features of the WeightWatchers® app is the barcode scanner, which was designed so members can quickly know the Points® value of a packaged food while at a grocery store. The barcode scanner relies on a database in the cloud, so if our app can’t send a request to the server, the barcode scanner is useless. What creative ways could solve this problem? Thinking out loud, one solution could be when the member is online, downloading the necessary data of foods in their area so the app isn’t reliant on a server when offline. The point being, solutions are reachable and quite doable.
That’s just one example of how the WW app can be improved when offline. A very high percentage of popular apps today have any number of downfalls when it comes to load times and offline abilities. Why is that?
It’s the same reason everything isn’t accessible. The two big reasons: (1) Lack of representation. (2) It’s human nature to design for yourself, who you know, and where you live. Many tech companies generally are in San Francisco and New York City — cities with high speed internet and cell service, where everyone is using the latest, greatest, and fastest technology. These two reasons create an unconscious bias where people overlook the value of designing for poor people, or for people with slow or no internet access.
But there are solutions to these problems. Start by adding to your definition of what diverse hiring practices look like, including looking at people from rural areas and a range of income brackets. Companies can also build low internet, no internet practices into your product lifecycle — from research to design to testing.
Connecting everyone to the internet means more than not getting lost in the woods, it means climate refugees can find resources and shelters, it means anyone who relies on assistive technology can continue to do so wherever they are, and, of course, it can mean anyone at any grocery store can make healthy food choices.
I really enjoyed being disconnected in rural England but I also enjoyed sending my parents back home pictures once I was on Wi-Fi. My personal takeaway is to take more walks disconnected, but my professional takeaway is that we have an obligation to connect everyone and to continue to make everything accessible.
I really enjoyed being disconnected in rural England but I also enjoyed sending my parents back home pictures once I was on Wi-Fi. My personal takeaway is to take more walks disconnected, but my professional takeaway is that we have an obligation to connect everyone and to continue to make everything accessible.
