India has changed dramatically over the last couple of decades, but Indian government websites still largely look like they’re stuck in the 1990s. But a new initiative is trying to change all that.
The Indian government is looking to modernize and standardize the look and feel of its digital properties through the UX4G initiative. UX4G stands for User Experience for Government, and aims to enhance government applications using user-centric design concepts that are accessible, efficient and user-friendly. The initiative, under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, has even created a Figma design system and a Handbook to improve the user experience on government websites.
The handbook goes into details of how government websites should look. There’s a standardized colour scheme, and a modern-looking icon set that it suggests.
The handbook even specifies which exact fonts government platforms should use, setting for the modern Noto Sans Regular font.
There are even stylish colour guides that government portals can refer to.
There are instructions on how buttons should look and behave.
And there are even specifications for contrast ratios.
Now this is something that one would see at a mature company that’s looking to standardize its brand, but the Indian government seems to be looking to similarly standardize its digital touchpoints across its thousands of websites. These websites were all built at different times, and aren’t always regularly updated. This means that visiting government portals can often be a frustrating experience, far removed from the slick user interfaces that one gets used to while browsing the websites of privately-owned companies. But the government seems to have realized that this is a problem, and has looked to standardize its web and mobile interfaces. UX4G hasn’t only created a handbook and design system, but has implemented it on its own website — the UX4G site looks stylish and modern, and save for the tiny ‘Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’ logo on the top left, can be easily mistaken for a high-flying startup’s site.
The bigger challenge, though, would be to get the UX4G system to be implemented across government websites. There are different government ministries, different state governments, and all kinds of different authorities that run these websites, and it could be quite a task to get them all to move to this format. But the Ministry of Electronics and IT seems to have made a start by formalizing its design style, and one could hope that government websites look as slick and stylish as their private-sector counterparts in the coming years.