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Comment by simianwords | Hacker News Reader

what do you mean by aesthetics?

Consumer electronic product design. India has some native consumer and business electronics manufacturing (with chips designed in China), but for an outsider to the country used to good product design, using them is an alien experience. They could have at least gotten the software part right, but nope, even that's dated.

There are some companies that are working towards that end though, but they still have quite a long way to go. And a lot of native manufacturers in India have faced financial issues, so that's another hurdle.

Sounds like industrial design [1] or, maybe, HCI design [2] (iow. UX design) then. Got it, thank you for explaining.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_design [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human%E2%80%93computer_interac...

What are some examples of bad hardware product design from India?

Practically any Indian electronics company. Many of them with extremely dated designs.

Take IFB for instance - it's a native heavy duty home appliances manufacturer in India. Their product is solid and resilient, and in many cases better than their Western equivalent, like Bosch (which I must add is going downhill). You literally get a Miele quality product at a much lower price (30-50%). Yet they lose out to the more "namebrand" companies because the UX is something that would pass for in the 2000s.

IFB is the best, we rarely look at any other brand for cleaning appliances. Our washing machine has lasted decades. Those who've bought at least one IFB product generally swear by it.

Also, the latest appliances are fine; the UX is good enough. You don't need fancy stuff for the products in such a market; fancier UX might appeal to first-time buyers, but they get tired of all that soon and look forward towards saner options the next time.

I agree, but if IFB wants to be competitive with the likes of foreign brands in international markets, they really need to step up their game. Instead what I'm seeing is a retreat from international markets. IFB wasn't widely available abroad but it was available in the UAE back in the day, but now you can't get them from any major retailer.

Isn't this fairly common for Indian companies? I expect that's because the domestic market is large enough to not want to try expanding internationally?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IFB_Home_Appliances

TIL IFB is an Indian company

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