AJAX In Africa = Not a Nice User Experience

NOTE: This is a repost from my old blog posted on Tuesday, October 18, 2005 – its still very valid.

I live in Australia and have just come back from a 4 week trip in Kenya. I have had about 5 different email accounts over many years however I use my http://fastmail.fm and http://www.gmail.com account by far the most. However before I left, I spent a lot of time trying to divert everything to Gmail because I like it so much.

The short of it: Don’t do this if you are going to Kenya. Gmail is plagued by problems when accessing it over a slow link.

Sometimes you get a blank page, sometimes you get the basic interface, sometimes you get “Oops, something bad happened…”. At first I thought it was the browsers at the cybercafe (which surprisingly all have the latest version of Mozilla firefox) – however even using my own laptop from Australia had the same effect. Very confusing and very frustrating.

I don’t think the problem is with Gmail alone though. I have noticed these inconsistent failures across anything that uses AJAX over in Kenya.

To investigate what was happening – I did an experiment redesigning http://www.dudubaya.com – a site I specifically designed for access speeds in Africa that currently performs very well.

The design I came up was smaller in size (http://www.dudubaya.com/test/redesign2/test.html) however to my surprise the load times were more then 4 times the basic page.

I installed livehttpheaders in firefox and did some poking around. It seems the overall size is not good determinant over high latency links, rather the more objects you have in your page and depending on how they are arranged means additional requests and the cost of each additional request is marginally much higher over high latency links (notice that I use latency because I have tried throttling my connection in Australia to slow speeds but I don’t experience the same problems).

Furthermore Firefox tries to pipeline the requests but this also depends on how the elements in your page are arranged. And doing this rearrangement cut down load times in Kenya significantly.

Key Lessons for high latency links (and Kenya in general):

• Less Objects
• Arrange your html carefully so the browser optimizes requests
• No complicated javascript. Most accesses to the internet happen over old computers and rendering time becomes an issue for complicated layouts.

Anyone had experience with this?

Dudubaya goes Free

After a steady stream of requests to make postings free, I have decided to make posting on dudubaya completely free. I sent out an update email to all users who have ever posted to the site and its amazing how many email addresses are stale. Almost 10% of the emails have bounced.

For those that don’t know, Dudubaya is one of the little side experiments I started about 2 years ago to figure out the state of the Kenyan internet market and to help out my Mum. Initially I made some categories free and for all other categories, you need a PIN that can be purchased by obtaining a dudubaya scratchcard (shown below).

My rationale behind this was based on 2 things:

• Mobile phone prepaid scratchcards have spread like wildfire. Safaricom and Celtel (the 2 kenya telco’s) have almost every business as a reseller; the commisions these resellers get is measly. The card I would offer would have significantly higher commisions.
• Making the postings free would not help Kenyans out. There are a lot of enterprising Kenyans for whom this could become a full time job.

However contrary to my expectations, the whole scratchcard thing just didn’t pick up – I knew this from the first couple of months of feedback from the team on the ground. It took me this long to make the system free because a number of people had bought a years subscription worth of classifieds – it wouldn’t be fair to them.

Despite this, its been quite an interesting journey – from getting the team on the ground organized and building the site to getting a number 1 listing on google and yahoo – I have learnt a lot. I’ll share this over the next couple of months.