In his Budget speech last week, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley described the government’s initiatives to step up investments to improve digital access for the masses. He specifically mentioned a proposal to set up five lakh WiFi hotspots in rural areas.
While these investments are wise and laudable, they will be of little help to the common person if the websites that they get to are riddled with bottlenecks. For a technology powerhouse like India, our engineers put very little thought into the User Experience(UX)/User Interface (UI) components of website design. The result is a morass of horrifyingly performing websites which can scare most common citizens away.
Security concern
For one thing, many Indian websites rely on people to input data. When you are in a text box, all the keys of your keyboard including the backspace work just fine. But if your cursor is outside of the textbox, hitting the backspace key, by mistake, will instruct the browser to go back a page to the previous URL. Most websites do not warn you that doing so will refresh the web-page and any form data in it is automatically erased, resulting in the loss of the data inputed.
It seems Indian website designers are averse to the most time-saving keyboard shortcut of all: the copy and paste function. During data entry of sensitive information, account numbers for example, the copy-paste function is sometimes disabled. Certain websites don’t allow users to leave a web page to refer to information elsewhere to key in on the web-page. People may then have to write down account numbers on a piece of paper and then key them in.
Filing I-T returns online
For a government that wants to make the entire process of direct tax filing automated, the e-filing website is confusing to use. The site prominently displays a “List of Income-Tax Returns and Forms available for e-Filing” hyperlink, but the link takes you to a static web page that simply lists the various forms. A simple link to download each form itself would be valuable.
In fact, people who do not know that they have to download “utilities” would miss the “Offline Utilities” link completely. Even if one were to click this, they are treated to a lot of technology gobbledygook. What in the world is a “schema”?
When you go to the Traces website to examine your Tax Credit statement, you’re given an opportunity to download the document as a PDF file. But this file is password protected. It turns out that the password is your date of birth in the DD/MM/YYYY format. Why isn’t this made clear on the tax website?
And then there is the issue with Captchas, that annoying question challenging you to decipher an image and key in an obscure sequence of letters or digits that appear on the screen. The idea is to tell computers apart from humans because automatic bots will not be able to read those images and key in the text, like humans do.
Most Indian websites are so scared of spammers that the Captcha function is overused. For example, before you get into the SBI website, you have to key in a username and password — unique fields that bots are unable to populate. Once the bank has clearly established that a human has logged in, why does it force you to answer a Captcha challenge for a subsequent task, such as finding the IFSC code of a certain branch?
The IRCTC site does the same thing. After you’re done getting in and making reservations, including making choices that only humans can, you’re asked to answer a Captcha question before you finally book tickets. Why?
There’s also the issue of overdoing security. As I noted in an earlier piece, some online banking sites use four passwords: Login, Transaction, Profile, and the OTP. As though these are not enough, banks now force you to change all of these passwords frequently. Being obsessed with security to the point where customer convenience is compromised is a hallmark of extremely poor design.
Recaptcha
India’s website designers need to look at western websites to see how simple they are and adopt those solutions in our platforms. The Amazon website is one of the easiest to navigate. Google has deployed “Recaptcha” technology and is making it available to anyone who wants it. Accordingly, people have to just click a box saying “I’m not a Robot” and Google’s technology will properly ascertain that they are not robots. There are no more Captcha challenge questions on Google’s websites.
Indians already have to contend with foundational infrastructure problems such as poor data connections and non-availability of WiFi signal. But the world’s fastest internet infrastructure is useless if the destination websites that people visit are so difficult to use. The Finance Minister can set an example by ordering the IT department to improve usability of its various online properties. That would be a great start.