When we built the Halol Municipality Portal, our users were not startup employees on MacBooks with fast broadband. They were citizens using entry-level Android phones on 3G or slower connections, many of whom had limited digital literacy. This changes everything about how you design.
Performance was the first constraint. A page that takes 4 seconds to load on fibre takes 18 seconds on 3G. We set a strict performance budget: under 100KB of JavaScript on the critical path, images lazy-loaded and served in WebP format, and server-side rendering for all public-facing content so the first meaningful paint arrived before React hydrated.
Language support was the second. Halol's residents speak Gujarati primarily. The portal needed to be fully functional in Gujarati with Unicode rendering, locale-appropriate date formats, and right-aligned numeric formatting where applicable. Next.js's i18n routing handled the URL structure; a custom translation layer managed the content.
Form design for low-literacy users required the most iteration. Long single-page forms were replaced with short multi-step flows. Error messages were rewritten in plain Gujarati rather than technical English. Every required field shows an example of valid input. These changes reduced form abandonment by over 60% in our testing.
The lesson I've taken to every project since: accessibility and performance aren't features for edge cases. They're the baseline for building software that actually works for people who aren't like you.