An experiment in light expression

While browsing through the plethora of job sites in India, I noticed something that bothered me. Despite paying much attention to their homepage layouts, banners, and in some cases, even usability, most of the job sites catering to Indian professionals had pretty insipid, commonplace, arbitrary TITLE text. Most of the website titles had common phrases such as - ‘jobs’, ‘india’, ‘bangalore’, ‘chennai’, ‘pune’, ’search for jobs online’….

Now page titles are probably not the most interesting piece of virtual real estate, but couldn’t most of these companies pay a little attention to how similar they all look if they are opened next to each other in a tabbed browser? Why couldn’t the keywords be a little more enterprising, a little more descriptive, a little more differentiating? How did all the smart website designers and usability professionals miss such a small thing?

I find it odd that a well designed homepage could have an ‘HTML META ‘or an ‘HTML Tag Refresh’ listed as the page title. Shouldn’t Venture Capitalists or Private Equity analysts, those finance Gods who raise billions of dollars to fund or buy or sell these sites pay attention to how much attention their client (or their designer) pays to design detail?

From a recent IxDA post, I found some good references for US salaries of Interaction Designers and Usability Engineers. The salary ranges show a skew which would disappoint most opponents of the labor arbitrage angle of outsourcing - On an average, designers and usability professionals in America make an average of $65000 whereas their Indian entry level counterparts in blue chip product or services organizations are still paid somewhere in the $10000 to $15000 range.

This makes me wonder - If MBAs coming out of India are now being paid extremely competitive salaries since they form the backbone of business success, why are designers not paid more money than say, the average Quality Assurance Analyst, or the average template-driven software developer who’s hacking together a bunch of APIs lifted from the web. Didn’t Bruce Nussbaum note not too long ago in Business Week– “When people talk about innovation in this decade, they really mean design”.

If business innovation is essentially about design innovation, why are designers not considered at par with business professionals? For those interested in some number comparisons, check out the following links:

http://www.indeed.com/salary/Usability-Engineer.html

http://iainstitute.org/pg/salary_survey_2006.php

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/salaries.html

http://www.peakusability.com.au/resources/usability-salary-survey.html

http://www.stcsig.org/usability/topics/salary.html

http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/upa_publications/upa_voice/survey/2000_survey.html

http://www.spiritsoftworks.com/resources/2004-salary-survey.htm

http://www.designsalaries.org/

I recently caught Kevin Cheng’s interesting interview on communicating concepts with comics. Kevin is a Senior Interaction Designer at Yahoo and has been using comics as a technique to bring forth the richness of design scenarios.
Reading this interview, i wondered - Can Indian comics be used to develop richer scenarios for designing more relevant technology products for Indian markets? Could all those Amar Chitra Katha and Indrajal Comic readings indeed be of help in understanding how say, a migrant rural population might adopt touchscreen computers?

In the next few weeks, a couple of us are organizing a design focused un-conference - Dcamp Bangalore. Dcamp is similar in spirit to Barcamp, but with a focus on Design, User Experience, Usability and generally, design driven innovation.

The general notion is to create a casual, peer to peer, hands on space where designers and design enthusiasts can connect, share ideas, and learn - No ribbon cutting, no lamp lighting, no invited celebrities, no corporate ideological axes to grind - Instead ideas, interaction, creativity, and henceforth - interesting and unpredictable outcomes. Isn’t that what perhapsness and possibility is all about! Ok Ok, no preaching either at Dcamp…
The event is slated for early September. If you are a product manager, entrepreneur, technologist or generally, a design enthusiast, you can register at the Dcamp wiki site or we’d love to hear from you on design topics that might be of interest to you!

One of Prof. Sadagopan’s columns in i.t. magazine titled ‘As I see IT’ is very interesting from a trending perspective. Every issue, the article lists important trends in the tech economy, such as — number of mobile subscribers, graduating tech student salaries, the presence of Indian tech companies in top 10 lists of ‘something notable’, recent IT acquisitions, and the like.

However, whenever I get a chance to read through SS’s latest pot pourri of statistics (and I labor under the questionable assumption that the tech economy is an indicator of India’s overall success), I ask myself the question ‘Am I a natural pessimist about India or a cautious optimist’. After reading the article I find two conflicting voices in my head – one says that India is unquestionably headed in a better direction, and another feels that all these lists of achievements mean something only to the elevated and temporarily-sedated -with-retail-therapy middle classes and not the ‘great unwashed masses’ as a philosopher once called them.

That being said, India turns 60 on August 15 this year and despite being a cautious optimist, i feel quite happy to be part of this moment in spacetime. : -)