Orbit Learning · 2025
Rebuilding an education platform around the slowest device
A performance and accessibility rebuild that made a secondary-school platform usable on the hardware students actually own.
- Time to interactive on reference tablet
- 19s to 3.1s
- JavaScript delivered per lesson
- 71% smaller
- Lesson completion on low-end devices
- +38%
Where it started
Orbit's platform was built and tested on new laptops on office broadband. A third of its students were on shared four-year-old Android tablets, where the dashboard took nineteen seconds to become interactive and frequently ran out of memory.
What we did about it
- 1
Test on the real device, not the average one
We bought the three tablets most common in the client's schools and made them the reference hardware. Every performance budget was set against the slowest of them rather than against a median.
- 2
Move the work off the device
Rendering moved to the server, the client bundle dropped by 71%, and lesson content was restructured so a student loads one lesson rather than an entire course tree.
- 3
Treat accessibility as a teaching requirement
Full keyboard operation, proper heading structure and captions on every video were scoped as functional requirements. In a classroom this is not an edge case, it is a proportion of every cohort.
What changed
Completion gaps between students on new and old hardware narrowed to within four percentage points, and support tickets about the platform freezing stopped almost entirely.
- Time to interactive on reference tablet
- 19s to 3.1s
- JavaScript delivered per lesson
- 71% smaller
- Lesson completion on low-end devices
- +38%
“Every supplier told us the platform was fast. It was fast on their machines. This is the first team that asked what our students were holding.”
