Frustrating user experience = Loosing Customers

International calls has become cheaper these days from USA. Usually, when ever I call India, I use Reliance's service ( reliance is India's largest private information and communication services provider). Reliance charges 12.99 cents for a minute. And every month I spend average of $70 to $90.

Yesterday I wanted to call someone who are in India & my friends told me about the Airtel's Deal. Airtel (India's leading provider of telecommunications services) has recently started long distance telephone services. Their rates are 7.99 cents and also their deals are "Get double talktime on sign up and first recharge". so charge for $50 and you will get $50 free. So Its 3.99 cents a minute. Airtel is much cheaper rate than competitor Reliance. I had to call some body in another 10 minutes of time in India. So in the mean time I wanted to check Airtel India call plan in their website www.airtel.co.in . And I logged into Airtels website and tried registering. It was very difficult to register and got frustated and decided to call India through Reliance service (even though charges are 75% more) and recharged for $10.

Why do I pay more for the same service and why did I got frustated in registering in airtel site. Since I browse lots of webstis and I register in most of the site I visit, I have never read the password guidelines. So I Keep on tried register 5 times, and error message showed as password do not match. Then clicked at the password help & it was much more confusing.

This is the best example of how the user gets frustated with a bad password guidelines. It took nearly 12 minutes for the incomplete registration. Below shown screenshot is the confusing password guidelines in airtel site.

Yahoo!, Google, MSN, ebay, citibank, aol - also provide secured websites. None of these sites force any password guidelines to users. Guidelines no.1 says 8 is the minimum character, but generally 6 is the common across many sites. 3-4-5-6 are totally strange.

Airtel's phone service is targeted to NRI and who mostly live in USA. And most of them are computer, bank and medical professions. They type of users has set of browsing patterns. All these users will have access common websites like yahoo, msn, google, ebay, hotmail etc login.

• So all users have behaviour of having 6 or more characters in passwords.


• These users generally use alpha numeric.


• Some people use special characters


• These users will have multiple accounts and they have to manage n number of passwords.


• Most of the accounts will have same passwords


• Its important to have commonly used guidelines to remember the passwords.

New methods & innovations should gel with the user behaviour and it should have life to it.