May 07 2007
Times of India’s plug on usability and India’s 60 years of independance
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.
