The occasional light expression

Yesterday on my way home I got a call from a certain car dealership company in Bangalore from where I’d purchased my first car. After some small talk on how the car was doing and such, the lady rep on the phone got to the point. Here is how the conversation went:

Rep: Sir, did you receive a customer feedback form from our Delhi office

me: Umm, No

Rep: Sir, when you do could you make sure you rate us 8 out of 10

me: What?

Rep: Sir, the ratings of the Delhi office are really important for us. If you rate us less than 8 it will reflect bad customer service

Me: Umm, O…K, but what if i got bad customer service (which i havent, but what if)

Rep: No problem Sir, you rate us over 8 and come to the showroom - we will fix whatever problem you’ve had with us

Me: Right…ok

At that point the rep hung the phone leaving me puzzled if i were living in some strange Orwellian fantasy world for those 2 minutes!

CKS Consulting recently released the Mobile Development Report. Over the years CKS (formerly the Center for Knowledge Societies) has done some pioneering innovation consulting work focused on emerging economies.

In its signature style, the report notes…”Those seeking to be involved with the coming media revolutions that are bound to unfold in emerging economies such as India would be advised to leave behind the expectation that these regions shall merely come online or replicate industrial societies’ adoption and enthusiasm for the web as it exists today. This will not merely be a web 3.0 or a mobile 2.0. The world of mobile media in India by the end of this decade will be more richly immersive, multiply-mediated and nuanced, through subtle forms of gesture, moving, growing, shifting and changing at the rate of sociality itself.”

Will Value Added Service providers, and telecom providers wake up and develop meaningful, contextual, relevant applications and services for the large semi urban and rural consumer base in India?

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?

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. : -)

After a 6 week hiatus from blogging, i’m finally back. Some of the most surreal moments in the past month were spent in the moonscapes, sand dunes (yes!), snow peaks, winding roads, and rarified mountain air of Ladakh.

I suspect i’m still down with what a writer once called the Post-Mountain Syndrome, where city life (and especially life in the tech sector of Bangalore) appears to be like a pale shadow of a shadow of the exhilaration I experienced walking through, being driven through and simply being in the mountains.

I should have the pictures of my Ladakh trip up on Flickr soon

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…..

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.

This Monday I flew Jet Airways from Delhi to Bangalore and was pleasantly surprised by Jet Airways’ new in-flight entertainment system. The system has a good and contemporary music selection ranging from the unavoidable Himesh Reshammiya numbers to some good jazz. What stood out in the music experience was the jukebox function which allows users to quite easily select tracks and add them to a playlist. The jukebox does have its usability issues including 1) you cannot select songs from a particular album without actually selecting to ‘play’ that entire album 2) the playlist disappears from memory if the inflight entertainment system is shut off - which happened to the playlist i created before the flight took off 3) at some point you can get back to the main menu and have the song playing and have no way to turn off the song without actually selecting another one!

As such the system is quite visually savvy and the video selection isn’t all that bad but the availability of music in that 140 minutes flight made it a pleasant experience for me.
Apparantly the competition saw this coming and now Kingfisher has implemented Live TV in its flights - becoming one of the few airlines in the world to offer this service.

Business Week has a timely article in its April 2007 issue on areas of work where different industries in different geographies are facing a severe human resource shortage. The article notes that the supply for several key professionals including engineers, plumbers, electricians, lab technicians, accountants(!), skilled manufacturing workers, equipment operators, and other such hands on professions is very squeezed. The list is topped by - guess what - the Sales Representative :-)

I was reminded of a thought experiment i once did that if there were a Third World War, and we went back to the stone age, what kinds of ‘professional’ skills would I need to be able to survive? I suspect story telling, teaching, cooking, and playing some kind of music that crowds can tolerate might be somewhere on top of that list…
Regarding the labor shortage in India, the article notes that ” The labor squeeze in India gets lots of attention. Oddly, though, Manpower’s survey found that employers in India reported the least problems filling jobs: Just 9% said they had difficulty, vs. 41% in the U.S. and 82% in Mexico. The explanation? Manpower’s staff thinks turnover is so rapid in India that employers figure if they really need to fill a job, they’ll lure someone away from another company. But stealing scarce talent from rivals isn’t a strategy for the long run. That’s why employers are on an all-out campaign to increase training and raise education levels. While India produces 400,000 engineering graduates a year, few have the skills and language abilities to work in an advanced multinational corporation. Some 1.3 million people applied to tech-services giant Infosys Technologies Ltd. (INFY ) last year, for instance, but the company says only 2% of those were employable. For business, it seems, there’s no shortage of work involved in easing worker shortages.”