In a recent ‘usability' study of 121 most popular websites in India undertaken by the online research consultancy, JuxtConsult , it found that only 19 (or about 1 in 5) of these top websites were really ‘customer-responsive'. That is, 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 website tested, 95 websites had a ‘contact us' or a ‘feedback form' or both available within 2 clicks. The rest 26 did not have any such possibility to contact someone from the website online.

Of all the 95 websites that had some form of online contact facility available, JuxtConsult's testers sent a query to each. Only 21 websites responded, with 19 of those responses being appropriate and 2 responses being only ‘interim' auto replies.

Not surprisingly, the websites that responded to the queries were largely e-commerce websites or websites that depend on their users directly for revenue generations – 5 online shopping sites, 5 bank sites, 2 travel ticketing sites, 2 job sites, 2 matrimony sites. Also at the same time, 15 of these 19 customer responsive websites are the ones that have qualified to be defined either as a ‘Best Practice' or as a ‘User Friendly' website based on the User Friendly Index developed by JuxtConsult.

Interestingly, in terms of the time it took for these website home pages to open up (downloading time), almost 46% of the websites took more than 5 seconds to open up, which could be termed as ‘slow' under the usability norms. Only 44 websites (36%) were really ‘quick' in opening up, within 3 seconds.

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. In the study, all the 121 websites 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.

The 23 popular online categories included in the usability study and the websites which topped with the highest usability index in each of them are as follows:

Further details on the methodology of the study, evaluation criteria used, and calculation of the user-friendly index of websites can be checked out at www.juxtconsult.com

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