State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

Take any application, any product and the success boils down to the usability. If the customer experience is not good, it does not really matter that the product has great features. Whether working on a corporate website, blog or a mobile phone application, usability tops my list of priority. Why? throughout my career, I have observed and experienced the fact that Usability is the key to success.

Usability may seem an abstract concept and can be hard to describe but the impact of improving the user experience is very real and powerful. For an emerging market, it is very important to create products which people with low technical exposure can feel comfortable with. This is one of the reason Nokia has been successful.

For various reasons, Asia is not known to be the leader in usability. This is true for most countries in the region, including Pakistan where the ICT industry is relatively new. I was happy to learn World Usability Day 2008 which is being organized in Lahore by the Interaction Design Center (www.ixdc.org) on November 13, 2008. More info at Experience Matters.

Here is an excerpt about a related blog post from Green & White. Also see this post on web 2.0 usability .

There is a lot more that goes into making a successful product than just making it functional or pretty which unfortunately is the normal approach with most apps being built by folks in Pakistan. This state of affairs is true for products produced by both amateur web developers and large multinational corporations alike. Let’s take a closer look as to why this happens:

First, the ‘functional’ part. Most software developers are guilty of this, i.e., just making functional software. They are good at coding and programming. Their minds have been – excuse the pun – ‘programmed’ to think in terms of bits, bytes, constructs, procedures, data models, etc. Applications built by them are functionally sound – they might be feature-rich and even bug-free. But that’s about it. Software developers and programmers take a lot of pride in believing that they belong to a special class of people because they are able to do work that involves some level of technical complexity.

But they usually lack one key trait: empathy for the user. And this problem is somethimes compounded by an unhealthy dose of arrogance and contempt for other disciplines. Of course, the ‘FAST types’ can code, add features, but what they produce is usually undesirable. Why? Because, they have been trained to think in an ‘implementation manner’, and not through the prism of the user’s needs and way of thinking. In addition, just building features into an application doesn’t make life simpler for the user, in fact, it actually adds complexity.