I visited the visa webs tie the article complained about. It was not very beautifully designed, but not especially awful either. This feels like one of those periodic Economist articles where the author vents about some personal grievance to fill up column inches during a slow news week.
The one big issue with Indian Government websites is that there is no single unified visual language, something that UX4G [1] is aiming to fix.
Other than that, I agree; this reads like the rantings of an young intern incapable of operating anything not built using whitespace-heavy "flat" interfaces.
I do think most government agencies are crap. The only one I have encountered good were UK ones and they have a pretty strong and interesting stack. They showed a talk at a MozFest where their compatibility went back to Next browser iirc. Due to the same reason though some of their relatively simple forms are multiple pages since from what I understand they don't allow "branching sections" in a single page
P.S. I think US is worse in every aspect. Try booking a US Visa appointment. Also as someone who has done both, Indian tax filing is significantly better as compared to the US where a government site doesn't exist. The worst offender in India was the driving license portal. (Older forms did use to be a weird excel UI and getting it to work on libre office was a nightmare I abandoned)
The only places I recall seeing a marquee tag are Geocities, my 11th standard programming class in Chennai, and Indian government websites. I suspect the last two things are not unrelated.
Before you read beyond this paragraph, grab a glass of water and 1,000mg of paracetamol. Walk over to your laptop—the supercomputer in your hand is not up to the task—and make yourself comfortable. Now navigate to indianvisaonline.gov.in and see if you can figure out how to apply for a visa.
Reminds me of my middle school HTML project in computer science. Ironically, my project (as an Indian) was a website for promoting tourism in Paris XD.
Other than that, I agree; this reads like the rantings of an young intern incapable of operating anything not built using whitespace-heavy "flat" interfaces.
[1] https://www.ux4g.gov.in/
I guess the “problem” was it didn’t use bootstrap icons
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik9IeChLqEk (think it was this one)
P.S. I think US is worse in every aspect. Try booking a US Visa appointment. Also as someone who has done both, Indian tax filing is significantly better as compared to the US where a government site doesn't exist. The worst offender in India was the driving license portal. (Older forms did use to be a weird excel UI and getting it to work on libre office was a nightmare I abandoned)
It is a fully centrally funded and built system that makes the whole thing uniformly decent.
Site is built with Bootstrap 5 fwiw.
ig I did not have the stress of actually needing it?