Jared Spool has an interesting article on top user experience challenges. They are:
- Scalability
- Visual Design
- Comprehension
- Interactivity
- Change Management
The other gap I see very often is Site Speed. In my experience, speed makes a tremendous difference to how much a site gets used. What is your sense on readiness of India’s skill pool to address the above – are we there or getting there to world class levels on these areas? I personally feel more confident of software issues such as change management, than areas like visual design and interactivity. Any thoughts?
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Check out the innumerable sites from India and you know how pathetic they are. There is no respect for the user who is going to use the site either for consuming information or for interacting with the site.
Most of the sites either are very bad in UI or some have such good aesthetics that they forget the usability of the site. In my interaction with many web designers and other product managers, I realized they don’t understand what usability is or have a misconception of its principles. For them it starts and ends with good looking UI.
Scalability and Change Management from a usability perspective needs real good people. What troubles me is that right people are not used in for this purpose. And even when one is used, he/she is brought in when faced with the issue than when the application is designed.
The other three visual design, comprehension, interactivity are some thing that might not need expert. (For smaller projects). However, what I see is the developer puts on the hat of the above roles. This invariably results in a lousy product. At least have these functions done by some one who is not too close to the design and architecture of the product.
Coming to the talent pool, we have some real gem of people, but until usability as a discipline gains recognition, its difficult for these gems to get polished.
Here is my 2 paisa.
Do we lack soft skills of web world?.
Not sure.Being a great believer of evolution and follower of free market I would say lets wait for more time when demand of better UI can generate more wealth then what it cost .
Then again when I remember my experinece at most respected and wealthy of the indian internet properties I begin to think otherwise.Poor UI is norm in indian internet properties.I am sure they can hire best talent. Only reason left for such neglect of UI isthat UI is not given attention it deserve.
I agree thst different internet properties hav different UI needs amd it cost a good money to get a good UI working.
When I am on SN you want me spent as much time as possibe to monetize it with ads. But when I am booking a rail or airline ticket I want to do it as fast as possible and yes you will not make money by making be surf ur webiste but making be buy a ticket.
@Gaurav
I TOTALLY disagree with you.I dont visit rediff just becoz of its pathetic user experience ,same is true for TOI online.Although I spent hours on net I prefer to buy magazines rather then reading them online just becoz their online edition sucks.I read similar experiences of othet users.I know your next question will be “whay the hell then they change their Ui?”.Becoz they are enganged in getting many more first time user everyday then taking count how many they lost.The day the equation changed we will witness next UI evolution cycle in India.
Better UI experience is a object of CUSTOMER DELIGHT.And at present no business in India beleive in “CUSTOMER DELIGHT”.
I agree with Prashant and Krish. Usability seems to be a non-priority or a lower priority for Indian sites. IMO in addition to the low priority by the businesses, majority of the users are not vocal/demanding about it.
I think usability should begin with robust functional quality. There is no point debating about color schemes and font sizes when the underlying functionality itself is broken. Let me provide one glaring example — I use Airtel’s calling cards to call home in India and buy cards from their website at https://www.airtelcallhome.com
They recently introduced the text verification code feature, but the site does not recognize the code that you typed in unless you step out of the field. It is surprising to me that such a large company would roll out changes without adequate testing. It took me 2-3 failed attempts to figure out what the problem was. Another annoying behavior is they ask you to select the country you are calling from on their homepage. The dropdown has only one choice — USA!! This translates to two extra clicks without adding any value. Why not use a cookie instead? Finally, the error messages and other strings are frequently grammatically incorrect.
Usability improvements must begin by fixing such issues.
I think we have come a long way in Usability. 9 years ago, when I joined Human Factors engineering, people here wouldn’t even get it which field this belongs to, why would there be education for simple things like Usability? Now things are different, both in US and India. Everyone is giving importance to Usability and User Centered Design. One thing that Web 2.0 did is bring the focus to UI which was lacking before.
Once companies make UCD a normal part of the development process the rest will follow. In my daytime job at Oracle, there is heavy focus on Usability from start of a project. However for my internet startup, we focussed so heavily on the functionality we are lagging behind on the UCD aspect and we are doing catch up now.
In past couple of weeks, while seeking help for UI facelift, I did discover that there are definitely lot of freelance UI designers and lot of the dev shops have pool of UI designers out here in India.
The quantity seems to be there, I am yet to find out the quality of these designers. Lets see.