Most Indian news websites score extremely low when it comes to being responsive to its users, a recent survey has found.
According to a User-Friendly Index developed by online research consultancy firm JuxtConsult based on 32 individual usability criteria, the most user-friendly news website is Aajtak (aajtak.com) with a score of 0.656 on a scale of 1.0. Aajtak, however, came only a way-behind 63rd in the overall rankings in the usability study of 121 most popular websites in India undertaken by JuxtConsult.
The next in the line were BBC 0.656 (overall 64th), NDTV 0.625 (overall 74th), Timesofindia 0.625 (overall 75th), Yahoo 0.594 (overall 83rd), Sify 0.594 (overall 84th), MSN 0.531 (overall 98th), Rediff 0.500 (overall 103rd), Indiatimes 0.500 (overall 104th). The category was a mixed bag which included newspaper websites, as well as sites of television news channels, and generic news portals. The industry average was 0.63.
The study found that only 19 (or, 1 in 5) of these top websites were really ‘customer-responsive’. Of the 121 websites tested only 19 websites replied appropriately to a mail query sent to them either on their ‘contact us’ email id and/or their ‘feedback form’. The study also found that among the 121 websites tested, 95 had a ‘contact us’ or a ‘feedback form’ or both available within two clicks. The rest did not.
JuxtConsult sent a query to each of these 95 websites. Only 21 responded, with 19 of those responses being deemed appropriate and two being only ‘interim’ auto replies.
The websites that responded to the queries were largely e-commerce websites or ones that depend on users directly for revenue generation – five online shopping sites, five bank sites, two travel ticketing sites, two job sites, and two matrimony sites. Fifteen of these 19 websites were the ones that qualified to be defined either as a ‘Best Practice’ or as a ‘User Friendly’ website based on a User Friendly Index developed by JuxtConsult.
This evaluation and classification of the top 121 highly popular websites in India in terms of their customer responsiveness and download times was done by JuxtConsult as part of its study to measure and calculate ‘User Friendliness Index’ (UFI) of these websites. All the 121 sites were measured on the 32 individual usability criteria to arrive at the comprehensive usability index, or ‘User-Friendliness Index’ (UFI) of each website.
To make the study fairly comprehensive and representative, top 5-6 websites from 23 popular online categories were included. The top 5-6 website from each of these categories were selected using a combination of the Alexa traffic ranking data and the user popularity of these websites as measured through a large online Internet survey conducted by JuxtConsult in May 2006 under its ‘India Online 2006’ study.
