🧭 Scenario · Make the call
The site that's slow on the other side of the world
The situation
Your website's one server sits in a data center in New York. Visitors in New York say the site loads instantly. But users in Australia complain that images and videos take forever to appear — even though the server isn't busy and has plenty of spare power. Every picture they request has to travel all the way across the planet and back, one file at a time.
You haven't read about this exact system. That's the point — walk the three questions a designer asks: what's really wrong, what fixes it, and what does the fix cost?
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Diagnose
Read past the story. What's the REAL problem — not what the feature does, but what's actually going wrong?
Look past the story. What's the REAL problem here?