Onboarding Flows for Low-Bandwidth Users

We assumed our onboarding drop-off was a UX problem. The session recordings told a different story: most drop-offs were just loading spinners on 3G connections outside Dhaka.

Defer everything that isn’t step one

We moved every non-essential asset — illustrations, fonts beyond the system default, anything above the fold that wasn’t a form field — out of the first screen’s critical path. Time-to-interactive dropped by more than half.

The lesson generalizes: for a meaningful share of users outside major cities, "loading state design" is as important as the screens it’s hiding.