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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Did you try using it?

I’ve applied for evisas to India multiple times, it’s extremely buggy and many times you’ll have to start again from the beginning… additionally, their payment processing is often not functional so you have to keep retrying the payment…

Once the visa is applied for, the process is usually quick.

I never had a problem with applying for an evisa myself - including stopping midway and using the resumption token thing. There was an awful lot of stuff to fill out, but thats a legal thing, not a web design thing.

I do remember feeling the payment process was a little sketchy, but it worked alright

I had a similar experience last year applying for an evisa. I think pay off the issue was related to the pages timing out before the extremely slow server somewhere in India could process the query and respond. My relatives on their iPads and few year old mid-range dell Inspirons could not manage and had to consult me for help.

Part of the way. I didn't want to give them my personal data or money as I have no plans of visiting India.

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.

[1] https://www.ux4g.gov.in/

Imo, UX4G looks dated af too.

Clarity and predictability is more important than modernity when serving 1.5 billion diverse people.

The UX4G main site is partially broken for me

It was a functional website that I could navigate easily!

I guess the “problem” was it didn’t use bootstrap icons

Did you try to apply for a visa? It’s a horribly buggy form

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