Some Usability Issues That Troubled Me Big Time

I paused. Looked around to find a decent, sensitive e-tailing site of India. None exists. I didn't give up. I tried ICICI but even they let me down. SIFY was the best, they are right on top at giving me a shopping experience that made me puke, and ofcourse laugh. Other sites that I haven't mentioned are no good. One good thing SIFY did after 2001: I had pointed out way back about how sify's payment page was completely different from the other pages at a usability summit conducted by UPG). Now they have integrated their payment gateway web pages, and the shopping site's design. Consistent look and feel was taken care of... but I leave it to you. You be the judge.

List of things that pissed me off

• ICICI bank giving me error messages like ad banners (green text on black BG). I wanted an 'online account, so i was asked to sign up. I did, but I missed out some important information like customer id etc, I thought my a/c number would do. And I thought it was an ad banner and It took me 5 attempts to realise that it was an error message. A costly deviation from standards! Good work Infosys
• Reliance's corporate site: I wanted to find Reliance infocomm's site from here. Took me 10 minutes. They hid it in a drop-down menu that has at least a dozen items and 'group sites' is the last! How nice. If one can't even build their own business website properly... how do you expect me to trust this company to offer me leading-edge CDMA mobile solutions?
• The number of screens I have to endure while shopping at SIFY. And the absolutely confusing homepage (of sify.com). I was blinking and I was scanning for a 'shopping' link to go to the sify mall site. I found two, but after a while only. Why can't they have it in the obvious place? My eye moves left-to-right, nothing in that path OR the screen was too cluttered. I endured it all, and selected a product and I checked out, i forgot the steps but tell you what, I have shopped at Amazon, an Mp3 CD seller who sells from his personal site, rediff.com (er rediff was a bit tough but it was better than this). But nothing was as tough as SIFY. You know, I am willing to spend MY money and you are supposed to make me feel AT EASE, instead of pissing me off with your gratuitous graphics and long-winding and misleading 'help' documents. Read an excerpt below of SIFY Mall's 'Help':

  Why shopping at Sifymall is safe! Safe Payment Gateway: When you pay by Visa card at Sifymall.com, the credit card details are entered by you directly on the ICICI Bank secure server and are not captured or stored anywhere else.This facility will soon be extended to Master cards as well. Safe Technology: Our secure server software (SSL) is the industry standard for secure commerce transactions. It encrypts all of your personal information, including credit card number, name, and address, so that it cannot be read as the information travels over the Internet.

  Outdated information. Inaccurate and misleading information. You name it. You got it at sify mall help. Whoa! someone needs a writer badly. But hey, aren't you the guys who hired bigtime from ad agencies? You know all those creative types? I am not nitpicking. Mind you. I am not being a critic here. I am a disgruntled shopper whose opinion on e-shopping took a nose dive. These people, the so called IT giants are killing the market for B2C by not payng attention to user-centric design. I got nothing to lose. But them? Don't even ask!
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