An experiment in light expression

Alexander Kjerulf ’s blog has several interesting posts on innovative workplaces, work related happiness, and such. This post on ‘Top 5 reasons why the Customer is Always Right is Wrong’ should be read by those IT-entrepreneurs and large multinational companies laying out miles and miles of cube farms across Bangalore and other places in India. Could there be a corelation between the IT industry’s 15% attrition rate and the BPO industry’s over 50% attrition rate to the manner in which most Indian organizations care for their employees? Very seriously, very few Indian workplaces (with exceptions i’m sure - design houses, movie studies, MTV offices) would be considered as cool, hip, and happening. Or at the very least, inspiring.
If you are in Indian IT professional or manager, take a look at some of the cool workplaces in this post. The images suggest (doh!) that there is a lot more that goes into employee satisfaction, motivation and capacity for innovation than simply paying people 15% more money every year…If most of the drab, soulless, and cold Indian workplaces reflect the state of the innovation quotient of their people, then most workplaces are doing a great job of hiding their innovations or simply had none in the first place :)

Where have all the great workplace designers gone from India? Did they never exist?

I am a generally happy Airtel customer. I’ve used their landline, broadband, and mobile services for a couple of years now and I’m always happy to report Airtel generally as a world class customer experience - especially at those times when broadband woes strike in the middle of the night. I would rate my experience with Airtel’s call center agents higher than with any of their counterparts in the financial services industry (Citibank take note).

However, there is one interesting and somewhat perplexing feature of Airtel’s Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system for phone based bill payments (using credit cards) that is disconcerting. And its not only the booming voice, a point well noted by Shruti Bhandari in her blog post. It is the cognitive dissonance caused by listening to a Frankenstein voice - one mixed with distinctly Western, North Indian and South Indian English accents. Now the individual voices are in themselves not a problem. What causes my hair to stand on end is that the voice which validates your 16 digit number or phone number alternates between the Western sounding and Indian sounding voice. Imagine hearing 3 being read in a stern Western tone and 7 being read in a soft South Indian tone. By the time the entire number is read out, I have to say “creepy…”

I wonder how Airtel missed this. The booming mixed-locution voice almost sounds like Airtel picked up a few Western style number intonations from an old IVR system, got one of their agents to record the other numbers, and then cobbled the whole thing together with some duct tape.
That strange locution apart, I love the IVR - saves me and them the trouble of hunting for each other when its bill payment time every month.

That said, why doesn’t India’s fledgling technology products and services industry pay more attention to these simple aspects of consumer experience? Anybody remember the nightmare of dialing the Indian Railways number (139) and having to dial about fifty times before someone actually picks up the phone…..

Manu Sharma has a great blog post on how Apple’s employee badges were designed to be as distinct as the products the company designs. The post is a good reminder that all great design outcomes are a result of multiple forces at play: Executive management sensitivity, a respect for individuality, an aesthetic grounding across the company, and a VERY user centered design process (not a reactive usability engineering process).

Here are some of my observations from the field in India’s technology sector. While an employee badge is the least of ‘motivators’, in the true Chinese tradition of starting every journey with a small step, it is a great starting point. A new employee is uncertain about many many things when they join a company. A well designed ob-boarding process, and certainly a well designed badge essentially says to the employee ‘There’s some thought behind things here’.

And here’s where most Indian companies get it wrong.

Several companies in the Indian IT industry follow the lowest common denominator to employee badges. Most badges are printed on cheap plastic, with even cheaper plastic covers, use employee-submitted dull ‘passport’ photographs, and include as Manu points out, all sorts of extraneous information. The result is depressing looking employee badges that give no sense of pride, no sense of inspiration, and certainly no sense of differentiation in an extremely commoditized marketplace. And then companies complain about employee loyalty! I suspect the reason for this is not only costs, but also that it gets outsourced to a Security setup which has no stake in employee satisfaction, only in workplace safety. It gets worse. Since almost everybody in Bangalore wears some kind of collar tag, all the way from BPO executives, office boys, Citibank sales drones standing outside ATMs and airports, to just about anybody and everybody, an employee of a company with a black, or red, or blue collar tag has a thousand other people in the city wearing the same tag.
Here is my wishlist for a GOOD employee badge:

1. Some customization on shape
2. Change your own pictures
3. Bright and cheerful

4. Some metal, not all plastic

Human Factors (HFI)’s redesign of the Times of India website is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it is one of the more advertised re-designs of Indian web portals. Indiatimes has gone all out to advertise its improved ‘usability’ - even written an article about it!. And with some pretty flowery language too….”In the 60th year of India’s Independence, we’ve freed your TimesofIndia.com from the shackles of yesterday. And in defining the new tomorrow in a Web 2.0 world, we had the best adviser. You. It was from your constant feedback, brickbats and bouquets, that we drew the essence of the brand new TimesofIndia.com”. Right………………

Notwithstanding the unabashed plug on ‘improved navigation’ and ‘user generated feedback and ‘advanced usability engineering methods’ I think this is a good reference point on how Indian companies are very quickly waking up to the need for a user centered design process for product differentiation in a largely unusable space of Indian websites - The Indian Railways museum of horror - www.irctc.in comes to mind. (Much like CEOs discovered ‘Design’ and started running around to find designers the way a poor sod bitten by a snake runs around randomly for an antidote!). Products ranging from the famous desktop finance app Tally to ICICI Bank to new entrants such as Minglebox have hired usability professionals or consultants to make their sites more usable. There are rumors that even the very-successful Shaadi.com and Naukri.com are looking for usability managers and professionals to drive the next generation of their sites.

All in all, good news for professionals engaged in the business of design, usability, user research, ethnography, and related areas in the Indian market.

Last Monday I visited the Infosys campus on Hosur Road, Bangalore (Image courtesy Diomidis Spinellis from http://www.spinellis.gr - Thanks Diomidis!).

In the two hours I spent on campus after my meeting, I met an old industry friend, Shan who heads the User Experience part of Infosys’s Communications & Design Group (housed in the much talked about pyramid), walked around observing the architecture, and doing a snapshot ethnography of campus.

In walking around, I was trying to notice the subtleties of the company that have made it a valued employer of choice in India, a super brand internationally, and the bellwether of India’s IT services industry. Here are some of my random observations on what makes Infosys tick:

1. Infosys has modeled its campus strongly along the lines of any top tier American university campus (Stanford comes to mind), and some of the American tech pioneers (Microsoft comes to mind). While most of the structures are indistinguishable, some, like the CDG Pyramid, the Terminal Food Court, Building 9, the lake and fountain areas, and overall, the wonderfully landscaping stand out as examples of good work. I was stuck that ironically, the Infosys campus seemed to have more ‘soul’ than most multinational campuses in India - while considering the scorching growth of the technology sector in India, most companies have reconciled to having drab, grayish white buildings with cheap glass facades. Infosys certainly gets the importance of having an inspiring physical campus.

2. Looking around at the Infosys staff walking around on campus, especially in looking at the old-timers, I got a sense of confidence, well being, and a sense of purpose and even more so - of people having been around for a while. Because of Infosys’ presence in industry for over 25 years, there is an interesting demographic distribution – I saw many people in their 30s and 40s on campus, lots of women employees, and lots of Euro-American or Asian expats. Incidentally the Infosys internship program has been one of the most sought after program for international students in overseas universities looking at good experience and the ‘India flavor’ on their resumes. Infosys seems to get the urgent, burning need for cultural and conceptual diversity to drive innovation and that one has to create a global workplace IN India to foster that global diversity.
3. The Infosys focus on ‘care & nurturing’ areas, including the standardization of processes, the consistency of processes, the fairness of the compensation and career pathing, and above all, the diversity and imaginativeness of the food courts is noticeable. Among others, I noticed a world class bakery run by a Frenchman (try the cinnamon rolls and croissants there), and a plethora of breakfast and lunch options, all dished out at very subsidized rates and with the quickness that the Indian IT industry is famous for. Certainly no one goes to office to have great cafeteria food, but the extra soft touches were visible.
My ‘external-observer’ observation of all the designers, usability professionals and other ‘creatives’ I met at the pyramid was that most of them are the kind of people you’d like to have a great conversation with over coffee, and in general work with. There is a great deal of diversity within the group – from a chap who designs world class Annual Reports to a chap who redesigned Infosys’ award winning corporate Intranet, to a dedicated HR lady whose job is to keep the design staff inspired and motivated. The glasswork in the pyramid is also quite intriguing (though I hear complaints about the greenhouse effect!), and the rooms – named after luminaries such as Steve Jobs and Spielberg house posters, books and more books – always a peek into the minds of the founders of the design group.

Great thoughts and some vision that went into all this! I think more technology companies should take a leaf out of Infosys’ book in terms of some of the elements of its campus, its architecture, and of course its spanking cleanliness :-)