Designing for the World's Worst Projector: UX Lessons from Extreme Contexts
When I designed digital lessons for thousands of schools in Chile, the real user was not the student: it was a room without curtains, an old projector and a screen washed out by daylight.
There is a phrase designers repeat so often that we almost stop hearing it: design around the user. The phrase is right. The problem is that sometimes the user is not who you think.
When I was asked to design digital lessons for an educational product that would reach thousands of schools across Chile, I assumed my user was the student. A curious, distracted, energetic 10-year-old. I designed for that child with care, detail and everything I knew about capturing the attention of someone who would rather be outside at recess.
I was wrong.
My real user was the classroom.
The assignment and the thrill of the first draft
The team was young. We wanted to prove we could make something different, something that felt alive compared with the educational materials of the time, which were often glorified PDFs or PowerPoint decks with 1990s clip art.
A workshop teacher once told me: “Create as if you had all the budget in the world, then adjust.” That is exactly what we did. The first MVP was genuinely beautiful. Good typographic weights, a careful color palette, illustrated characters guiding the student through each lesson, solid interactivity for the time and animation with intent.
We were happy. We were convinced we had something special.
Until we took it into a real classroom.
The moment of truth
The user test did not fail at the edges. It failed at the center. What looked sharp and expressive on screen became a bright, low-contrast stain when projected in a classroom. Characters disappeared. Text pushed the limits of legibility. The subtle animations we loved simply vanished into the ambient light.
The problem was not the design. The problem was the context we had not designed for.
Most schools in Chile, especially public schools, did not have high-quality projectors or blackout curtains. The classroom was not a cinema. It was a space full of daylight, with a mid-to-low-range projector and a screen competing with the windows.
That environment had its own rules, and we had ignored all of them.
Redesigning from constraint
What came next was one of the most rigorous design exercises I have ever done: finding the minimum contrast that survives the worst conditions.
Meeting WCAG accessibility standards was not enough. We needed what we internally called extreme contrast scales: color and background combinations that worked in the worst classroom in the Chilean school system.
We spent weeks testing. Projecting at different times of day, under different light levels and with different projectors. Black on white became the acid test: if something could not be read there, it had no right to exist in the product. Colors we loved on screen were removed without mercy. Beautiful gradients that added no functional contrast were replaced by solid blocks.
The final result was not what we had dreamed in the first draft. But it worked. And in product design, working is the first condition, not the last.
We were doing flat design before it became a trend
One detail still makes me proud: we decided to abandon skeuomorphic iconography long before flat design became a global trend.
At that moment, the dominant style in digital interfaces was the one Apple had popularized from the early iPhone years. Icons had depth, highlights and textures that imitated real materials. It was rich and attractive, but it lost legibility when compressed or projected at low resolution.
Microsoft would not launch Windows 8 with its minimalist approach until 2012, and Apple would not officially move toward flat design until iOS 7 in 2013. We reached similar conclusions for a purely practical reason: icons with gradients and shadows simply did not read well when projected in a bright classroom.
So we adopted flat, clean-line iconography without complex fills. Not because we were following a trend, but because the use conditions pushed us toward the correct solution.
Constraint, once again, was a better teacher than inspiration.
The performance problem
The other front was technical, and it forced me to think beyond design.
The delivery format was .swf, the output file from Adobe Flash. Flash was, for years, the standard for animation and interactivity on the web and in educational digital products. It was powerful, flexible and capable of memorable experiences.
The problem was performance. A .swf file with complex animations could overwhelm a low-end computer, which was exactly the kind of hardware available in many public schools at the time. If the animation froze or loaded slowly, the educational experience was interrupted, and so was the class’s attention.
The solution was a very detailed animation optimization process: reducing the number of vector nodes in every animated element to the minimum possible. Every unnecessary curve in a character, every background detail that did not improve legibility, was a processing cost the computer had to pay.
In the end, it was the same logic behind code optimization in web interfaces today: what users experience as smoothness is the result of invisible decisions made by the people designing and building the product.
A product that reached 1,500 schools
The result of that process, and of all those iterations forced by reality, was a product distributed across Chile and implemented in more than 1,500 schools nationwide.
I do not mention the number to talk about scale. I mention it because it represents something I care about more: real impact on real users in real conditions.
That is what designing for extreme contexts means. It is not glamorous. It is not what you show in a portfolio when you want to impress a startup design interviewer. But it may be the most honest exercise in our discipline.
What I still use today
Over time, many of these problems became less critical. Projectors improved, computers improved and the web browser replaced Flash Player as a delivery environment. Designing for a school in Chile today does not require the same extreme contrast gymnastics we needed 15 years ago.
But the principle has not changed.
First: context of use is part of the design. Not the ideal context. The real one, with old hardware, poor lighting and slow connections.
Second: constraint is not the enemy. The beautiful first design was good on its own terms. But the one that reached 1,500 schools was better because it had been tested, hit by reality and adjusted.
Third: sometimes you reach the right solution for the wrong reason. We adopted flat design out of functional necessity, not aesthetic vision. That is fine. What matters is that it worked.
Have you had to design under conditions you did not control? I would like to talk. Message me on LinkedIn.