yep and the 503 service unavailable popping up because a website with max a few thousand unique visitors a day gets millions of users at the same time!
@@biscuit7379yup, this cheap but works juggadu principle worked when we were a dirt poor country. We still aren't developed but much better off now then those times. India needs to now focus on quality. And the public demands it too, like look at gpay, so clean ui and no wonder most of young crowd prefers it over that baingan colour phone pe or that anxiety inducing Paytm. Another examples of great ui are the stocks apps and shopping apps. World class ui.
Except the government websites. Private franchises got best ui in the world. You might compare Amazon with flipkart, Chroma or mynthra. Mobile banking and railway or flight booking apps like red bus, make my trip etc got best UI in the world.
So a few months ago I logged into the website for Delhi police cyber crime reporting. My browser warned me that the page is unsafe and is likely to run a phishing attack! Literally the very page that you're supposed to login to report a phishing attack itself is http, not https. India is irony impaired. It's not that Indian web design is bad. It's Indian GOVERNMENT web design that's actually bad. Compare any Indian government branch website with that of a private organization and the differences are a couple of internet generations apart. Check Indian railways for example. Literally a 15 year old could draw up a better looking web page with html but no, they wouldn't do it.
Its such a contrast to Indian app design. Apps like Blinkit, Zomato, Cred, Swiggy, Flipkart etc have some of the best UI/UX designs in their categories.
As an Indian, I think Indian apps are ahead of the curve. It's very different from iOS or Android design language though. In Indian apps there's usually a long scrollable landing page which has almost everything it offers. For more options you usually have to go inside your profile/account page
For SBI another big reason is most of the young people use their apps, which have much better UI. Desktop sites are used by fewer people and more tech literate people, so there is a lower incentive to improve it.
american indian here but my limited experience with SBI website from helping my grandpa has been a pain. The app is much better. Honestly though american government run websites are poorly made and dont really work. Even if slightly frustrating indian government websites at least work LOL.
most of us Indians started our browsing journey with slow dial-up modems. Hence the tendency was to scroll or browse more info in the same page..rather than click and wait for a new page to buffer. That user behavior has got ingrained in us. Meanwhile, with the rollout of 4G and 5G, our bandwidth speed has leapfrogged to another level. As a result, the click-fatigue has sustained while the dialup-inertia remains ingrained,hence we prefer more usagable-info density per page. (Anyone trying to book a tatkal ticket on IRCTC website will know this pain)
Nah, as an indian who has been using these websites forever, I can confidently say they are quite difficult and confusing to use. Don't even get me started on the Service design aspect of things - you'll asked to go from one touchpoint to another with no simple solution in sight for something that could be super straightforward.
Exactly. Asking professionals with designation in important companies (like Google employees) for their opinion means they cannot state the truth. The SBI website is shit. ICICI also has fundamental problems in it's website, the App is better. She should have checked what Zomato or Swiggy or Zepto Apps UX looks like.
@@motog-rocks6544bro I think you didn't even see the govt college and other facilities website I didn't know the hell they have a cs department in their colleges even in some private colleges. And there is no need to talk about some websites which you rarely visit and every time it changes its link.
I think it's the lack of a standard design language within the government bodies in India and also lack of awareness. I mean most of the govt. Institutions aren't even aware of things like UI and UX and design. They outsource the work and the companies making these websites just put no effort. But they are FUNCTIONAL!
Add to that, everyone and his uncle want to see their idea/project on the home page leading to cluttered dense pages. On top of that, information architecture - uhhh what's that?! Last straw, English is still a second/foreign language for most graduates. They can understand and communicate in it, but can they write "well"? I can explain my product in a long paragraph, but can I do it in a sentence, or even fewer words?
yea agree. Its just the public sector has much wider audience & low literate audience to cater, otherwise India has good progressive applications like Blinkit, Zomato etc
Another thing to note is that most people access these websites through e-seva centres or whatever they're called in your state, essentially a person (usually a guy) in a small room with an office PC, internet connection, printer and all the stuff you need for biometrics, that or post offices and local bodies. So they don't care about the UI because most people operating it have done so hundreds of times in a week and have basically developed a muscle memory.
@@thelakeman2538 yes. It's only in recent years that people started using the government services on their PCs. Otherwise the E-helpers always did the job.
As a solo developer, one thing I notice that we Indians don't like rapid change but can accommodate small incremental changes. This is why WhatsApp is popular in India, they changed the design with one feature at time and people here can adjust to small changes faster. I also follow these techniques in my apps and have 2m+ active loyal users. 👍.
SBI is a indian government bank and most of its design and development work is outsourced to TCS, Infosys. Which is phenomenal cheaper if you compare to go out for any private companies. Every bank have certain budget they can allocate towards departments. Well, it is true that indian is a content rich culture. But, definitely the website experience can better what it is today. It’s happening today but, slowly. This is a great content :)
Good point. Plus on average, the SBI site content loads fast and the layout is simpler and more functional. I'd much rather have that than something that looks awesome but is slow to render and somewhat un-intuitive.
As a Indian I acutally like site which give me info upfront rather than seeing it one by one (it actually irritates me , just give me that juicy info man 😂)
This is misleading, you're just showing the design of government and public sector websites. People visit those sites to do essential tasks, wide compatibility and reliability is the requirement there. But, on the other hand the websites of private companies and Indian businesses are some of the best designed and use latest trends.
Partially true. No entities in india decide a customer to look at the things that the company wants us to see. Be it any private or public owned entities. They try to show the max context as possible. It is the consumer who chooses what they get from the content. But there shouldn't be any minimalism put for content. This might narrate a true control over what the seller wants you to see. So by this narrative, no one should give you a minimal context for buying into something that you may have come for a different purpose.
It's abt speed and reliability, those websites are simple but they work, reliable as hell, and the point that I can see all info in front of me is cool, no hidden menus
As a former front-end web developer, Most government (state and union) government websites have not been updated in years. Injections could exploit them.
The websites you are showing are also public utilities. A large number of people use these on a daily basis. When a large number of users are using the site, the server load is huge. So the design is such that people can login and finish the work they need in minimum time possible. So everything is up front and center. Also probably thats why they dont change the website much.
CSS doesn't cause that much data, I'd like to argue that the amount of text on the pages takes more data than a minimalist css would. So this reasoning sounds totally non plausible to me
@@DipJyotiDeka CSS would not cause this much load. Ofc they can't add animations cuz that would just slow down it overall, but this is not an excuse for not having a good ui
Good UI is loaded client side, not server side, so load problems shouldn't be an issue. Also, if designed smart, good ui won't require too many resources from the client.
I have been using State Bank of India's site for years -- the one you show in the intro. My experience is that it just works. And by "just" i don't mean barely, i mean simply and reliably.
it absolutely does! It doesn't 'break' randomly. And the same goes for the app. Even the maintenance is something that's scheduled out - it happens dead in the night when most of the users are sound asleep AND comes with SMS notifications announcing the maintenance timeout days in advance. it works - simply and reliably.
Just visited the Bank of America site-it’s also simple and straightforward. Government and banking sites need to adhere to certain basic rules; they can’t use flashy animations or designs because they are intended for a wide range of users. Your comments sound like they come from someone with very little experience in web development.
Haven't flown air India in years because when I did, I could never, ever, ever do a web checkin. Either it couldn't find my pnr, or the server was out, or captcha couldn't load, or a combination of factors. You guys are telling me it's different now? Haven't used the website so I wouldn't know, but really?
@@nihar1987 'Coz It's Now Acquired Back By TATA (That Is: Privatised), From Government of India 🇮🇳... & Thus, TATA Will Merge Shortly Air India With Its Already-Owned Vistara... Thus, A Tight Slap To The Very Socialism & Economic Decay For The Last 5-6 Decades...
These government websites need a UI update. Just because something works doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be improved. As a regular internet user with hundreds of accounts, I’ve never seen such poorly designed websites. Once, while registering for my local employment office, I missed a tiny red button that needed to be pressed, resulting in no documents being uploaded. I had to redo the entire process. This happens often, even to experienced users. There are many other issues I could mention, but I don’t have time to list them all.
Uhh as someone who grew up in both India and the USA, I don’t think the designs are necessarily good but it’s just that there is such a high population and lack of good services, it ends up working as long as it’s free. Most people in India aren’t exposed to US’ startups websites either. Of course this depends on your demographic in India. You have it right tho it’s straight to the point usually with lots of text to explain
@@writersnoise true. hot take but as a startup founder myself, I think it’s just natural evolution to go towards simplicity. All Asian countries’ websites are very similar but if there was more abundance and less competition, there would be less FOMO and less desire for consuming everything. I really liked Phoebe’s video on Japanese websites too and I think FOMO is an underlying principle
@@Taayjusuntill we have this level of Population and it's continuous Growth , we cannot achieve abundance and also cannot eliminate competition. i dont have any data to prove , but i guess , 100Cr or less could be a good sweet spot for indian population.
I remember reading a paper that boils down to "complexity converges". This is a perfect example for that. India is so diverse that we purposely make such old styled and complex websites so all the cultures can converge and use it and understand it more effectively.
You missed another important point in this video. Computing power of the lower-end smartphones, internet speed and bandwidth. An end user may be located in a metropolitan city or in a remote village with one bar 2G or 3G internet service, they should be able to access and utilise the services provided online. Text heavy designs with low/no media in them gets delivered fast to their end users. Also, this type of content doesn't consume too many server resources when a user accesses the site. On top of that, because of the scale of the user base, think tens of millions of users simultaneously accessing these sites. Because of all these factors, it is extremely important to design text heavy and minimal design websites.
Indians also use their phones until they're unusable or very difficult to use, also internet speed is slow in many areas so a website should be simple and should have lot of information, cuz digging through webpages is exhausting if you have a old phone and slow internet which loads things slower
0:57 See the thing is, the software doesn't *have* to work; rather you *have* to figure out how it works. Because almost always the loss is only yours. Checking exam results, applying for government exams, banking; all of these not working is first and foremost your problem because the sheer population means a lot of people would have figured it out and that means this design will probably never change.
You need a SBI account to know if it works, most of the common tools don't work where other bank apps do the same with ease, you still need to visit the bank for very common things like apply a card or ordering a cheque book
I personally believe Indian web designs focuses more on the functionality rather than a design. The minimalistic approach helps the users identify their purpose of visiting the website. Another point you did not mention is the app culture in India. People will download an app rather than visiting an website to perform their functions. We literally have an App for everything.
One of the reasons is also that simple html/xml content based on text and pre-defined libraries will load up faster even on the slowest connection speeds on the slowest of devices limited by hardware instead of heavy css and media and image based graphics and animations etc.
I'm disappointed that you haven't justified the title correctly but rotated all around the India~cheap~why Instead of why that website is there that way. So let me take this job -It is like that because many of the desktops still run on windows explorer and win7 in many government offices -India has a lot of devices with a lot of different tech being used. From Chinese, to American to Indian made phones like Lava, Micromax etc. The variation in tech is so vast, one website with so much responsive designs will cause glitches somewhere for sure. -Loading speed. SBI has around 50m active users, it has to load FAST. It's not like SBI is cheap, it has around 800 billion $ of assets all around India. Any town, even in many villages, SBI will be there.
I agree with your approach. While there are several Indian websites with modern designs influenced by Western culture, many people in India tend to prioritize cost over design. As long as a website is functional and affordable, they don't see the need to invest more in its design. Essentially, a lower budget often results in outdated or less polished designs, but since it serves its purpose, they don't feel the need to improve it.
A lot of them aren't exactly functional though? The amount of time it consumes to refill every detail multiple times just because a server error occurred, you confused the label with an actual button? So and so... Man, there are so many issues. The fact that anyone calls such websites functional... That's like bare minimum, no work gets done easily.
I disagree. Indian websites are horrible and some are outright unusable. It took me so long to just make an update to my PAN card because the website kept breaking and my entered info kept erasing. Not to mention all of them look shady and I keep second guessing whether I'm on the official website or just filling in my details to some scamster who's gonna sell my information to the middle east.
I am offended at zoom ins at weird angles and unnecessary showing people that are not good with tech. India has her own silicon valley ffs. We are the tech people, yet ironically this channel insists on showing footage of people that are not familiar with tech.
I'm an Indian. Especially a full stack developer working with React & .NET. Let me say it these govt websites confuses most of the time, have weard validations, session timeouts etc.. but somehow at the end of the day it works 😍
Reason: We don't have any proper IT Department. We have NIC which manages all websites through the country. One Department with countable old age developers to serve 1.5 Billion people. We need more budget, each state should have independent IT department that has developers instead of Officers that cracked the toughest Social Studies exam in the world.
Due to heavy server load and slow net connection . Its designed to be quick, you login in , do your work and log off .... Simplicity is ultimate sophistication. Text loads faster ..
You are right about the high context culture. It can be seen even in our ad pamphlets and wedding cards and not just website especially with regional languages across the country.
It's not always the design sometimes it's the performance, SBI has extensive worload, they have huge no of customers logging in every minute so if probably have experienced a page that loads up rich content and video loads slowly, so they wanted it to work even in a slow low bandwidth connection also. Similar approach I have seen for some US companies also where in backend hotel management softweres why use this kind of simple page to minimise to load during heavy hours.
Please dont say that it works cause it doesn't lol. As an Indian it's really a pain in the ass everytime we have to use government or public sector websites and the private sectors mostly are very well done and different. The problem doesn't lie solely on UI but majority of it lies in UX of the web portals. They give contracts to companies who doesnt care much about it and pretty sure barely any research are conducted for the websites as to deliver it in a tight deadline.
I think it's the difference between government Vs private websites. Private companies like Swiggy, Flipkart, Cred, idfc bank have much simpler and easier to use designs than government websites
Oh my god, please tell this to Amazon India. The BEST design doesn't matter. Just design a good enough UI and KEEP it. Amazon India constantly keeps changing their interface. It's incredibly annoying and counter productive. They often do this without adding any further features.
2 หลายเดือนก่อน +6
it works in the lack of an alternative. like a dirt road works
At 08:19 the guy says "tier one city will have 100,000 in habitants or more" .......!!!!!!........... seriously bro, which universe are you living in ???. Tier one city in India will have upwards of 10,000,000 inhabitants. But other than this uninformed comment the video was refreshingly well balanced.
If you want to draw a comparison, you could examine the UI/UX of consumer-oriented services like food delivery apps, e-commerce websites, or ride-hailing platforms. These tend to put more emphasis on attractive design to engage users, in contrast to professional sector interfaces.
Only one side of the coin . India leds in number of transection, but China USA comes top of total value of transection amount , Ex in 2023 China 3.2 trillion usd, India 670 billion usd
@@backemf89 wtf are you yapping about lil bro🤦 did you even read my comment I said India leads in digital transactions not in terms of amount but it leads in terms of tech 😂 India’s UPI is superior to any transaction tech anywhere in the world there is no other equal to it that’s why France and indonesia and other countries l have also adopted UPI and many more countries have also requested to adopt UPI 😂 it’s the safest most advanced mode of transaction in the world 😂 you need to stop glazing other countries my guy
I loved your direct take on the Indian web design. I currently live in the UK and when I look at differences between the two countries in this aspect you can feel the difference. I think we Indians have refused to change in some aspects but im hopeful we will learn as well😂 My pet goal is to contribute in reimagining this for today’s modern India 👍
If you see the same branch app in mobile called yono sbi you can see more modern design they have and also minimalistic UI , i think in india public sector companies focus more on mobile device rather than both pc and mobile phones.
It not about being cheap but the webpage being lightweight to load faster for the large number of users. The heavier the look and feel it will cause performance issues when concurrent users are high.
In the end the main point of a website/app is to do something. People can figure out how to get things done if the functionality works properly. Expectations and familiarity, excitement and newness, are mostly irrelevant. They are just nice to have that people wrongly give priority later on when the functionality is stable and options are plentiful. But why didn't japan change to simplicity? Is it just high context culture or collectivist mentality of everybody using one thing or lack of options because of consolidation? Im curious if there's society which is high context and collectivist which switched to simpler design. Singapore?
We don't glorify poor design. We hate SBI and all other poorly designed govt websites. Govt neither has time nor has budget to make it pretty. SBI website is optimised for performance, not for usability.
This is the best of that cheap design tho😭 government websites and government college websites are pain in the ass to surf through. And uploading documents on is another level of headache they make it the most annoying process to fill any kind of form.
It's a nightmare when the whole country is checking the results of a big exam. The website basically stays crashed for the whole day sometimes. And same situation happens while applying for exams or anything.
Well in South India we people dont wear white at funerals. We just wear our daily wear dresses at funerals. When it comes to festivals, we wear mostly newly purchased dresses with bright colors(mostly females), by next year it becomes daily use dress or just used during marriages, bday parties or other spl occassions. Men tend to wear simple dresses like Cotton/Silk Shirt and Cotton/Silk Veshti(Vetti), a kind of dhoti. Also younger generation both boys and girls wear more T shirts and Pants(Jeans/non Jeans) and girls wear salwaar kameez aur churidar, sarees too but dimishing compared to former three.
iam indian, not only the design is cheap, but sometime the software is not going to work, i was trying to update the address in the aadhar website last 3 days full of error and very slow and server busy errors, i was tried to update address in bank website got "Server error" i was tried to change the address in Voter ID full of errors and it was leaking backend codes also like "Sql errors" "java hybernate errors".. etc...
I love your videos!! Please continue to analyze and have open discussions about design around the world. There's no one cookie cutter design method i highly agree!
Being from India I can say that Indian websites are not this way. Only the old Government and bank websites are this way now. They are maintained that way to keep it familiar to the elderly people.
The only thing i was wondering while watching was: What even is Indian design? You basically just talked about a single bank webpage. No statistics, no general knowledge. Your points are so poorly justified. I'm sure they have no modern looking mobile apps, right? To which degree is india a "high context culture"??? Are Indian megacorporations so poor as such they can't afford an additional 100 bucks to make the button pretty? Ok, they supposedly skipped the desktop phase(btw i want some numbers to see if thats true instead of some bs rambling. You just wasted like 2 mins of time for hundreds of thousands, wtf is 80 percent market share) but how is that different with China? Africa? Most of the developing world? Why emphasize the obviously desktop version of the site so much while according to you, india is mobile oriented? Is there any evidence for your unoriginal points? And finally you just flip it and said there is no such thing as a single India. Absolutely mindblowing. So is Indian uniquely so mobile oriented, poor, and high-context such that some bank website has a cluttered main page? Besides the low quality of the video, I disagree with your final takes that culture largely impacts design and ux. There are tons of multinational tech companies that are obssessed with every single percent of user engagement that are universallt popular in most of the world(uber, google, fb, insta,netflix,booking holdings, amazon) which almost never bothers to meaningfully localize their ux. But thats just what i think. To end, I still have no idea what indian websites look and feel like after watching this video. And neither do I think you have any idea.
Dude she is glorifyin the info-dump. People who aren't into tech - literally give their information to middlemen/brokers usually cybercafes to fill up forms, bank statements etc because they don't understand how to navigate the mess. There's no culture/deeper meaning to it. Government gives out the website design to the lowest bidder that's it.
Absolutely. Wanted to make the same points. UI /UX design in popular Indian apps and websites is hugely different, and more or less follows the same design principles as any of the currently popular design paradigms. Take a look at Swiggy, Zomato, Myntra, Domino's India, Cred, Phone Pe, housing as examples.
AS AN INDIAN AGREE THAT WEBSITES OF GOVERNMENTBLOOK AND STUCK IN 2005 EVEN THE PUBLIC EXAM PORTAL WEBSITE LOOKS CHEAP ITS NOT THAT INDIA HAS NOT MONEY. I REALLY DONT HAVE ANY IDEA WHY THEY EVEN DIDNT UPDATED THE SEVERS YET
@@havenotchosenyet I had asked a genuine question. And Seriously sharing some science videos on Internet do any harm ? And I haven't made any money with that .
The main reason these websites look like this is because of low internet speed in India so that the websites load as quick as possible. I remember the transition from 3g to 4g and it didn't feel like any change. Of course with time it improved but 4g in India is still considered slowest in the world. Also, I remember most global sites would never load fully during the 2g and 3g era. Other factors that influence UI UX design are: 1. Target devices and viewers, their education level , adaptability, and their geography. 2. Cost and maintenance 3. More focus on backend than front-end. 4. Continuing to use legacy applications.
![กี่หมื่นฟ้า | Your Sky Series EP.1 [1/4]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/vLGjxFL6U_I/mqdefault.jpg)
ah the pain of having to check exam results on a government-run website
😂😂😂 yeas we all suffer😂
yep and the 503 service unavailable popping up because a website with max a few thousand unique visitors a day gets millions of users at the same time!
@@chiroyce server hila dala 😂
That is exactly why it is like that. To reduce load times, reduce size and accomodate millions of failures checking the site
Are you even able to find the proper link for that.
"cheap, but it works"
Our national motto right there.
😂😂
Sasta, -sundar- , -majboot-
offtopic ... thats also the reason of big accidents in our country for example some cheap contract based infrastructure falling off like pieces
@@biscuit7379yup, this cheap but works juggadu principle worked when we were a dirt poor country. We still aren't developed but much better off now then those times. India needs to now focus on quality. And the public demands it too, like look at gpay, so clean ui and no wonder most of young crowd prefers it over that baingan colour phone pe or that anxiety inducing Paytm.
Another examples of great ui are the stocks apps and shopping apps. World class ui.
@@biscuit7379 yeah bro the new system is not implemented
As an Indian I can assure you SBI has much better website compared to many other gov websites😅
Except the government websites. Private franchises got best ui in the world. You might compare Amazon with flipkart, Chroma or mynthra. Mobile banking and railway or flight booking apps like red bus, make my trip etc got best UI in the world.
@@nature-won 😂
So a few months ago I logged into the website for Delhi police cyber crime reporting. My browser warned me that the page is unsafe and is likely to run a phishing attack! Literally the very page that you're supposed to login to report a phishing attack itself is http, not https. India is irony impaired.
It's not that Indian web design is bad. It's Indian GOVERNMENT web design that's actually bad. Compare any Indian government branch website with that of a private organization and the differences are a couple of internet generations apart. Check Indian railways for example. Literally a 15 year old could draw up a better looking web page with html but no, they wouldn't do it.
@@nihar1987 Thats what happened when you are hired based on your gender or minority group instead of your skillset.
If you forget your login ID or password, there is no forget password option. You need to visit bank to reset it😂
"If it works, don't touch it " mantra of govt employees as well
No it's more like "If it pays, don't work"
Often it is „if it does not work, still not touching it“
Like railways only. 12 hour delay but train arrived na
😂😂😂 best ever reply i had seen yet
Mantra is go to next queue and ask someone other than me. 😂
Its such a contrast to Indian app design. Apps like Blinkit, Zomato, Cred, Swiggy, Flipkart etc have some of the best UI/UX designs in their categories.
Flipkart's Design is just OK, not very impressive. But yeah, compared to the government apps/websites it's good
the apps you mentioned above are used by elites, not by masses.
whereas banks and govt websites NEED to serve nasses
@@rishabhgaur991 well Its better and much faster than Amazon and that is its only competitor so.
I get a headache whenever I try to order something on Zomato. TBH the SBI webpage looks pretty good. Its simple, to the point, not too distracting.
As an Indian, I think Indian apps are ahead of the curve. It's very different from iOS or Android design language though.
In Indian apps there's usually a long scrollable landing page which has almost everything it offers. For more options you usually have to go inside your profile/account page
She Cracked the code , summoned the whole indian community 😂
LOL yeah she's a genius ❤😂
Billion views trick
It works becuase the government won't change it, It's confusing as hell
@@rohitnaik1191 no
i agree, the goverment sites are s out dated u need tutorials to use em,
@@JonakT yes lmao it doenst matter how experienced you are at some point you need a very little level of youtuber to tell you how to do it.
soon, you will get new sbi website and app. wait for 1-2 years
@@pratikpatil4288 I think, you want to say 10-20 years
For SBI another big reason is most of the young people use their apps, which have much better UI. Desktop sites are used by fewer people and more tech literate people, so there is a lower incentive to improve it.
american indian here but my limited experience with SBI website from helping my grandpa has been a pain. The app is much better. Honestly though american government run websites are poorly made and dont really work. Even if slightly frustrating indian government websites at least work LOL.
You can't generalize.
Govt sites are always badly designed in India.
The same Indian private banks have the best UI I have come across
Lol,
Banking sites have the shittiest UI. Lmao
Uhh HDFC Bank ui
thats what she said
@@Heartless-MusicAiHDFC is awesome.
most of us Indians started our browsing journey with slow dial-up modems. Hence the tendency was to scroll or browse more info in the same page..rather than click and wait for a new page to buffer. That user behavior has got ingrained in us. Meanwhile, with the rollout of 4G and 5G, our bandwidth speed has leapfrogged to another level. As a result, the click-fatigue has sustained while the dialup-inertia remains ingrained,hence we prefer more usagable-info density per page. (Anyone trying to book a tatkal ticket on IRCTC website will know this pain)
Good point 👍🏼
Bingo
THIS !!
Very valid
Nah, as an indian who has been using these websites forever, I can confidently say they are quite difficult and confusing to use. Don't even get me started on the Service design aspect of things - you'll asked to go from one touchpoint to another with no simple solution in sight for something that could be super straightforward.
Exactly. Asking professionals with designation in important companies (like Google employees) for their opinion means they cannot state the truth. The SBI website is shit. ICICI also has fundamental problems in it's website, the App is better.
She should have checked what Zomato or Swiggy or Zepto Apps UX looks like.
@@motog-rocks6544bro I think you didn't even see the govt college and other facilities website I didn't know the hell they have a cs department in their colleges even in some private colleges. And there is no need to talk about some websites which you rarely visit and every time it changes its link.
But we like sbi and alike website design very much, and more comfortable using that
And the gazillion captchas. What's up with that?
i agree its difficult to use though and could do with improvement, but its fine not being fancy
Why do we need a complex website? If the website solves its primary objective, then why worry. Simple is nimble.
Yes
Har ek cheez me problem dikta ha logo ko
I think it's the lack of a standard design language within the government bodies in India and also lack of awareness. I mean most of the govt. Institutions aren't even aware of things like UI and UX and design. They outsource the work and the companies making these websites just put no effort. But they are FUNCTIONAL!
Add to that, everyone and his uncle want to see their idea/project on the home page leading to cluttered dense pages. On top of that, information architecture - uhhh what's that?! Last straw, English is still a second/foreign language for most graduates. They can understand and communicate in it, but can they write "well"? I can explain my product in a long paragraph, but can I do it in a sentence, or even fewer words?
yea agree. Its just the public sector has much wider audience & low literate audience to cater, otherwise India has good progressive applications like Blinkit, Zomato etc
this is a far better explaination than whatever nonsense this video says . govt is still don't give that much important to IT overall than it should .
Another thing to note is that most people access these websites through e-seva centres or whatever they're called in your state, essentially a person (usually a guy) in a small room with an office PC, internet connection, printer and all the stuff you need for biometrics, that or post offices and local bodies. So they don't care about the UI because most people operating it have done so hundreds of times in a week and have basically developed a muscle memory.
@@thelakeman2538 yes. It's only in recent years that people started using the government services on their PCs. Otherwise the E-helpers always did the job.
Thanks for showing the actual map of India
As a solo developer, one thing I notice that we Indians don't like rapid change but can accommodate small incremental changes. This is why WhatsApp is popular in India, they changed the design with one feature at time and people here can adjust to small changes faster. I also follow these techniques in my apps and have 2m+ active loyal users. 👍.
More like we hate to update ourself even if a button changes from one place to another, but don't even care when Government changes?
Interesting... what would happen if all these public websites did an entire redesign of everything overnight?
@@phoebeyutbt they won't.
@@phoebeyutbt they'll think they've entered the wrong url
@@phoebeyutbt It'll be suicidal for the government.
I don’t know why I clicked on this video but I don’t regret that.
SBI is a indian government bank and most of its design and development work is outsourced to TCS, Infosys. Which is phenomenal cheaper if you compare to go out for any private companies. Every bank have certain budget they can allocate towards departments. Well, it is true that indian is a content rich culture. But, definitely the website experience can better what it is today. It’s happening today but, slowly. This is a great content :)
but now websites are improved like if we check idfc bank etc website they looks modern
infosys and tcs are private but cheap
Good point. Plus on average, the SBI site content loads fast and the layout is simpler and more functional. I'd much rather have that than something that looks awesome but is slow to render and somewhat un-intuitive.
As a Indian I acutally like site which give me info upfront rather than seeing it one by one (it actually irritates me , just give me that juicy info man 😂)
This is misleading, you're just showing the design of government and public sector websites. People visit those sites to do essential tasks, wide compatibility and reliability is the requirement there. But, on the other hand the websites of private companies and Indian businesses are some of the best designed and use latest trends.
Partially true. No entities in india decide a customer to look at the things that the company wants us to see. Be it any private or public owned entities. They try to show the max context as possible. It is the consumer who chooses what they get from the content. But there shouldn't be any minimalism put for content. This might narrate a true control over what the seller wants you to see. So by this narrative, no one should give you a minimal context for buying into something that you may have come for a different purpose.
It's abt speed and reliability, those websites are simple but they work, reliable as hell, and the point that I can see all info in front of me is cool, no hidden menus
Absolutely correct, If you have been in portal. People work very fast on these websites to solve queries for many people in queue.
We indians want functionality
Not the way it looks 😂
Like West
Its doesn't work.. Dont lie
Bro no one wears bright colour clothes in a funeral in india. At least none that i know.
In northeast
i think she refers to how Indians wear white for funeral contrasting to the western black
In few subregions of south
@@JashanNandh04nope. Generally christians here and we wear black.
India DOES NOT have a homogenous culture. We speak hundreds of different languages, and follow thousands of different tradition.
As a former front-end web developer,
Most government (state and union) government websites have not been updated in years.
Injections could exploit them.
The websites you are showing are also public utilities. A large number of people use these on a daily basis. When a large number of users are using the site, the server load is huge. So the design is such that people can login and finish the work they need in minimum time possible. So everything is up front and center. Also probably thats why they dont change the website much.
CSS doesn't cause that much data, I'd like to argue that the amount of text on the pages takes more data than a minimalist css would. So this reasoning sounds totally non plausible to me
@@navysaw23 it's not data. It's the number of concurrent connections that put load on server.
@@navysaw23 in any other country or may be a non issue, but keep in mind Indian population, most IT infra probably find it difficult to handle.
@@DipJyotiDeka CSS would not cause this much load. Ofc they can't add animations cuz that would just slow down it overall, but this is not an excuse for not having a good ui
Good UI is loaded client side, not server side, so load problems shouldn't be an issue. Also, if designed smart, good ui won't require too many resources from the client.
I have been using State Bank of India's site for years -- the one you show in the intro. My experience is that it just works. And by "just" i don't mean barely, i mean simply and reliably.
But Axis Bank is really good too.
it absolutely does! It doesn't 'break' randomly. And the same goes for the app. Even the maintenance is something that's scheduled out - it happens dead in the night when most of the users are sound asleep AND comes with SMS notifications announcing the maintenance timeout days in advance. it works - simply and reliably.
Bro the editing and story telling is so complementing each other. So good. Just the music and sfx and it's a banger
Just visited the Bank of America site-it’s also simple and straightforward. Government and banking sites need to adhere to certain basic rules; they can’t use flashy animations or designs because they are intended for a wide range of users. Your comments sound like they come from someone with very little experience in web development.
I was surprised at the Air India website. It's like, it has the government website energy but also looks modern at the same time.
Just visited the page after reading this comment with no expectations, was quite impressed.
Proof that privatization works.
Haven't flown air India in years because when I did, I could never, ever, ever do a web checkin. Either it couldn't find my pnr, or the server was out, or captcha couldn't load, or a combination of factors. You guys are telling me it's different now? Haven't used the website so I wouldn't know, but really?
@@nihar1987check it out, it's so much better now
@@nihar1987 'Coz It's Now Acquired Back By TATA (That Is: Privatised), From Government of India 🇮🇳... & Thus, TATA Will Merge Shortly Air India With Its Already-Owned Vistara...
Thus, A Tight Slap To The Very Socialism & Economic Decay For The Last 5-6 Decades...
These government websites need a UI update. Just because something works doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be improved. As a regular internet user with hundreds of accounts, I’ve never seen such poorly designed websites. Once, while registering for my local employment office, I missed a tiny red button that needed to be pressed, resulting in no documents being uploaded. I had to redo the entire process. This happens often, even to experienced users. There are many other issues I could mention, but I don’t have time to list them all.
Shut up, things from your father's perspective who is not that' tech friendly,so it make sense
0:33 👏🏾 correct way to phrase it
The only youtuber who used the correct map of India. Subscribed.
Uhh as someone who grew up in both India and the USA,
I don’t think the designs are necessarily good but it’s just that there is such a high population and lack of good services, it ends up working as long as it’s free. Most people in India aren’t exposed to US’ startups websites either. Of course this depends on your demographic in India. You have it right tho it’s straight to the point usually with lots of text to explain
Yes, I think the new generation is moving towards the minimal western design
@@writersnoise true. hot take but as a startup founder myself, I think it’s just natural evolution to go towards simplicity. All Asian countries’ websites are very similar but if there was more abundance and less competition, there would be less FOMO and less desire for consuming everything.
I really liked Phoebe’s video on Japanese websites too and I think FOMO is an underlying principle
@@Taayjusuntill we have this level of Population and it's continuous Growth , we cannot achieve abundance and also cannot eliminate competition. i dont have any data to prove , but i guess , 100Cr or less could be a good sweet spot for indian population.
I remember reading a paper that boils down to "complexity converges". This is a perfect example for that. India is so diverse that we purposely make such old styled and complex websites so all the cultures can converge and use it and understand it more effectively.
I used to say "Double 1, Double 0". I used Nokia 1100 for around 7 years before losing it somewhere. I still crave for that phone.
As an Indian I can say that SBI website is one of the best website among other government websites.
You missed another important point in this video. Computing power of the lower-end smartphones, internet speed and bandwidth. An end user may be located in a metropolitan city or in a remote village with one bar 2G or 3G internet service, they should be able to access and utilise the services provided online. Text heavy designs with low/no media in them gets delivered fast to their end users. Also, this type of content doesn't consume too many server resources when a user accesses the site. On top of that, because of the scale of the user base, think tens of millions of users simultaneously accessing these sites. Because of all these factors, it is extremely important to design text heavy and minimal design websites.
I never thought this is even a issue, I don't think once, they are just websites, they can look same for more 100 years
Indians also use their phones until they're unusable or very difficult to use, also internet speed is slow in many areas so a website should be simple and should have lot of information, cuz digging through webpages is exhausting if you have a old phone and slow internet which loads things slower
Can we just appreciate how calm she is
0:57 See the thing is, the software doesn't *have* to work; rather you *have* to figure out how it works. Because almost always the loss is only yours. Checking exam results, applying for government exams, banking; all of these not working is first and foremost your problem because the sheer population means a lot of people would have figured it out and that means this design will probably never change.
You need a SBI account to know if it works, most of the common tools don't work where other bank apps do the same with ease, you still need to visit the bank for very common things like apply a card or ordering a cheque book
I personally believe Indian web designs focuses more on the functionality rather than a design. The minimalistic approach helps the users identify their purpose of visiting the website.
Another point you did not mention is the app culture in India. People will download an app rather than visiting an website to perform their functions. We literally have an App for everything.
I love this series Phoebe. Never stop researching and creating for this kind of content.
One of the reasons is also that simple html/xml content based on text and pre-defined libraries will load up faster even on the slowest connection speeds on the slowest of devices limited by hardware instead of heavy css and media and image based graphics and animations etc.
Yes
We usually use UPI Apps , Banking Mobile Apps not prefer Websites.😅
ya bro _ (1st) India is a leader in digital payments globally, with a 48.5% share of global real-time payment volumes
"It's not a bad design, It is a feature." -Indian websites
I'm disappointed that you haven't justified the title correctly but rotated all around the India~cheap~why
Instead of why that website is there that way. So let me take this job
-It is like that because many of the desktops still run on windows explorer and win7 in many government offices
-India has a lot of devices with a lot of different tech being used. From Chinese, to American to Indian made phones like Lava, Micromax etc. The variation in tech is so vast, one website with so much responsive designs will cause glitches somewhere for sure.
-Loading speed. SBI has around 50m active users, it has to load FAST. It's not like SBI is cheap, it has around 800 billion $ of assets all around India. Any town, even in many villages, SBI will be there.
True
thats exactly why its cheap. lmao.
@@RandomGuy-om1vy she explained Indian sites are cheap but not why. "Here's why" in the title, which is a clickbait
@@RandomGuy-om1vyyou don't understand shiiiet
I have been using the SBI website from last 9 years. I found it very simple and easy to use.
I agree with your approach. While there are several Indian websites with modern designs influenced by Western culture, many people in India tend to prioritize cost over design. As long as a website is functional and affordable, they don't see the need to invest more in its design. Essentially, a lower budget often results in outdated or less polished designs, but since it serves its purpose, they don't feel the need to improve it.
A lot of them aren't exactly functional though? The amount of time it consumes to refill every detail multiple times just because a server error occurred, you confused the label with an actual button? So and so... Man, there are so many issues. The fact that anyone calls such websites functional... That's like bare minimum, no work gets done easily.
I disagree. Indian websites are horrible and some are outright unusable. It took me so long to just make an update to my PAN card because the website kept breaking and my entered info kept erasing. Not to mention all of them look shady and I keep second guessing whether I'm on the official website or just filling in my details to some scamster who's gonna sell my information to the middle east.
I am offended at zoom ins at weird angles and unnecessary showing people that are not good with tech. India has her own silicon valley ffs. We are the tech people, yet ironically this channel insists on showing footage of people that are not familiar with tech.
I'm an Indian. Especially a full stack developer working with React & .NET. Let me say it these govt websites confuses most of the time, have weard validations, session timeouts etc.. but somehow at the end of the day it works 😍
Reason: We don't have any proper IT Department. We have NIC which manages all websites through the country. One Department with countable old age developers to serve 1.5 Billion people. We need more budget, each state should have independent IT department that has developers instead of Officers that cracked the toughest Social Studies exam in the world.
Due to heavy server load and slow net connection . Its designed to be quick, you login in , do your work and log off .... Simplicity is ultimate sophistication. Text loads faster ..
As we say in India when we are absolutely delighted by the existence of someone... "Bawa, you are beautiful". Keep up the great work
Finally my most awaited video, thank you Phoebe.
By the way, your video quality are very high. You will become a sensation soon.
To your surprise, the much touted _"Indian software"_ industry is 99.99% web design and development.
Look at indian app design on mobile it a whole different league
You are right about the high context culture. It can be seen even in our ad pamphlets and wedding cards and not just website especially with regional languages across the country.
It's not always the design sometimes it's the performance, SBI has extensive worload, they have huge no of customers logging in every minute so if probably have experienced a page that loads up rich content and video loads slowly, so they wanted it to work even in a slow low bandwidth connection also. Similar approach I have seen for some US companies also where in backend hotel management softweres why use this kind of simple page to minimise to load during heavy hours.
Thank God
Finally someone is talking about this topic
Please dont say that it works cause it doesn't lol. As an Indian it's really a pain in the ass everytime we have to use government or public sector websites and the private sectors mostly are very well done and different. The problem doesn't lie solely on UI but majority of it lies in UX of the web portals. They give contracts to companies who doesnt care much about it and pretty sure barely any research are conducted for the websites as to deliver it in a tight deadline.
Everything you hear is an opinion, not a fact.
^Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
Book Name: Meditation (Author: Marcus Aurelius)
I think it's the difference between government Vs private websites. Private companies like Swiggy, Flipkart, Cred, idfc bank have much simpler and easier to use designs than government websites
Cheap doesn't matter
It's cheap in india
But expensive in other country
Everything is perspective.....
Instagram changes its layout every month and that frustrates me a lot 😑
Oh my god, please tell this to Amazon India. The BEST design doesn't matter. Just design a good enough UI and KEEP it.
Amazon India constantly keeps changing their interface. It's incredibly annoying and counter productive. They often do this without adding any further features.
it works in the lack of an alternative. like a dirt road works
😂💯
At 08:19 the guy says "tier one city will have 100,000 in habitants or more" .......!!!!!!........... seriously bro, which universe are you living in ???. Tier one city in India will have upwards of 10,000,000 inhabitants. But other than this uninformed comment the video was refreshingly well balanced.
If you want to draw a comparison, you could examine the UI/UX of consumer-oriented services like food delivery apps, e-commerce websites, or ride-hailing platforms. These tend to put more emphasis on attractive design to engage users, in contrast to professional sector interfaces.
Keep making video related to India and Indians and you will get massive following very fast.
And the world still lacks behind India in terms of digital payments
Only one side of the coin . India leds in number of transection, but China USA comes top of total value of transection amount , Ex in 2023 China 3.2 trillion usd, India 670 billion usd
@@backemf89 wtf are you yapping about lil bro🤦 did you even read my comment I said India leads in digital transactions not in terms of amount but it leads in terms of tech 😂 India’s UPI is superior to any transaction tech anywhere in the world there is no other equal to it that’s why France and indonesia and other countries l have also adopted UPI and many more countries have also requested to adopt UPI 😂 it’s the safest most advanced mode of transaction in the world 😂 you need to stop glazing other countries my guy
@@prajvalrao4871 because I wanted to put it 🤨
I loved your direct take on the Indian web design. I currently live in the UK and when I look at differences between the two countries in this aspect you can feel the difference. I think we Indians have refused to change in some aspects but im hopeful we will learn as well😂 My pet goal is to contribute in reimagining this for today’s modern India 👍
Govt sites stuck in early 2000s, Private sites are modern 😊
the shittier the website the faster my job is done
😂please elaborate?
@@phoebeyutbt websites like slop when I open it everything is just out there no hamburger menus or sub menus
@@phoebeyutbt Fancy website - loads slow + more load on the server + shit network in some areas. Shittier websites - loads faster + gets my job done.
Actually we are used to these websites
@@magn1fic611Oh brother you're mistaken, Indian government websites are shitty looking and even shittier to navigate. It's a nightmare
The best explanation I have ever seen
If you see the same branch app in mobile called yono sbi you can see more modern design they have and also minimalistic UI , i think in india public sector companies focus more on mobile device rather than both pc and mobile phones.
Nice video just one correction.
People don't wear bright color or flashy cloths on funeral!
It not about being cheap but the webpage being lightweight to load faster for the large number of users. The heavier the look and feel it will cause performance issues when concurrent users are high.
In the end the main point of a website/app is to do something. People can figure out how to get things done if the functionality works properly.
Expectations and familiarity, excitement and newness, are mostly irrelevant. They are just nice to have that people wrongly give priority later on when the functionality is stable and options are plentiful.
But why didn't japan change to simplicity? Is it just high context culture or collectivist mentality of everybody using one thing or lack of options because of consolidation? Im curious if there's society which is high context and collectivist which switched to simpler design. Singapore?
We don't glorify poor design. We hate SBI and all other poorly designed govt websites. Govt neither has time nor has budget to make it pretty. SBI website is optimised for performance, not for usability.
00:10 banking 😂
This is the best of that cheap design tho😭 government websites and government college websites are pain in the ass to surf through.
And uploading documents on is another level of headache they make it the most annoying process to fill any kind of form.
it DOES NOT work 😅 0:22
It's a nightmare when the whole country is checking the results of a big exam. The website basically stays crashed for the whole day sometimes. And same situation happens while applying for exams or anything.
Cheap ❌
Affordable ✅
A well-made quality content, without resorting to any hate.
7:53 nowhere in india do people wear bright colours to funerals........india is a Hindu majority country and all hindus wear white at a funeral.
You can't generalize the white at the funeral.
She literally phrased "some parts.... and other parts....."
In south india some parts it is
Well in South India we people dont wear white at funerals. We just wear our daily wear dresses at funerals.
When it comes to festivals, we wear mostly newly purchased dresses with bright colors(mostly females), by next year it becomes daily use dress or just used during marriages, bday parties or other spl occassions. Men tend to wear simple dresses like Cotton/Silk Shirt and Cotton/Silk Veshti(Vetti), a kind of dhoti. Also younger generation both boys and girls wear more T shirts and Pants(Jeans/non Jeans) and girls wear salwaar kameez aur churidar, sarees too but dimishing compared to former three.
South Indian Hindus don't wear white though
I am just happy a foreign youtuber did not butcher the map....great video, great insights.
iam indian, not only the design is cheap, but sometime the software is not going to work,
i was trying to update the address in the aadhar website last 3 days full of error and very slow and server busy errors,
i was tried to update address in bank website got "Server error"
i was tried to change the address in Voter ID full of errors and it was leaking backend codes also like "Sql errors" "java hybernate errors".. etc...
You are very tech illiterate for someone who has tech in username
I love your videos!! Please continue to analyze and have open discussions about design around the world. There's no one cookie cutter design method i highly agree!
Being from India I can say that Indian websites are not this way. Only the old Government and bank websites are this way now.
They are maintained that way to keep it familiar to the elderly people.
It's miraculous how well some websites like irctc and sbi works considering the high traffic and low investment/technologies.
The only thing i was wondering while watching was: What even is Indian design? You basically just talked about a single bank webpage. No statistics, no general knowledge. Your points are so poorly justified.
I'm sure they have no modern looking mobile apps, right?
To which degree is india a "high context culture"???
Are Indian megacorporations so poor as such they can't afford an additional 100 bucks to make the button pretty?
Ok, they supposedly skipped the desktop phase(btw i want some numbers to see if thats true instead of some bs rambling. You just wasted like 2 mins of time for hundreds of thousands, wtf is 80 percent market share) but how is that different with China? Africa? Most of the developing world?
Why emphasize the obviously desktop version of the site so much while according to you, india is mobile oriented?
Is there any evidence for your unoriginal points? And finally you just flip it and said there is no such thing as a single India. Absolutely mindblowing.
So is Indian uniquely so mobile oriented, poor, and high-context such that some bank website has a cluttered main page?
Besides the low quality of the video, I disagree with your final takes that culture largely impacts design and ux. There are tons of multinational tech companies that are obssessed with every single percent of user engagement that are universallt popular in most of the world(uber, google, fb, insta,netflix,booking holdings, amazon) which almost never bothers to meaningfully localize their ux.
But thats just what i think.
To end, I still have no idea what indian websites look and feel like after watching this video. And neither do I think you have any idea.
Dude she is glorifyin the info-dump.
People who aren't into tech - literally give their information to middlemen/brokers usually cybercafes to fill up forms, bank statements etc because they don't understand how to navigate the mess.
There's no culture/deeper meaning to it. Government gives out the website design to the lowest bidder that's it.
This video sounds like an essay i would write in school- makes literally 0 sense, but hey atleast i passed
Absolutely. Wanted to make the same points. UI /UX design in popular Indian apps and websites is hugely different, and more or less follows the same design principles as any of the currently popular design paradigms. Take a look at Swiggy, Zomato, Myntra, Domino's India, Cred, Phone Pe, housing as examples.
Thanks sister for showing the correct map of India ❤
It works?? Using it is irritating as hell. Was using the SBI site an hour ago. For weird reason I couldn't login had to reset.
AS AN INDIAN AGREE THAT WEBSITES OF GOVERNMENTBLOOK AND STUCK IN 2005 EVEN THE PUBLIC EXAM PORTAL WEBSITE LOOKS CHEAP ITS NOT THAT INDIA HAS NOT MONEY. I REALLY DONT HAVE ANY IDEA WHY THEY EVEN DIDNT UPDATED THE SEVERS YET
I know people say govt. website crashes and takes time to load. But they forget the number of people who would be opening the website
why you won't call japanese and chinese websites CHEAP ? Why only Indian Websites ?
bcz japs had it censored
Seriously you guys will find a way to oppress yourselves somehow.
The victim mindset is so real.
Stop this. It's embarrassing. Stop trying to over identify with other people's work in the first place.
@@idkatthispoint-s9s colonial mindset . West havn't acknowledged what they did with India.
@@havenotchosenyet I had asked a genuine question. And Seriously sharing some science videos on Internet do any harm ? And I haven't made any money with that .
The main reason these websites look like this is because of low internet speed in India so that the websites load as quick as possible. I remember the transition from 3g to 4g and it didn't feel like any change. Of course with time it improved but 4g in India is still considered slowest in the world. Also, I remember most global sites would never load fully during the 2g and 3g era.
Other factors that influence UI UX design are:
1. Target devices and viewers, their education level , adaptability, and their geography.
2. Cost and maintenance
3. More focus on backend than front-end.
4. Continuing to use legacy applications.
If Indian web design is cheap then think about Nepal
Nepal has internet?
Here cheap means financial affordability, not of poor quality. Watch the video again
Your videos are an undiscovered treasure, and you're as delightful as an angel.💖💖