I have visited very few Indian government sites, but the list does include indianvisaonline.gov.in. Some have been horribly confusing, but some haven't. I did manage to get my Visa, complete with 17ish identical confirmation emails (I've forgotten the exact number). One common theme was that to me they looked old, and information dense.

I'm not against old-looking websites with lots of text. If done well, I think I even prefer it to nice looking modern pages with almost no information on them. We are, after all, having this discussion on HN.

The websites of Japanese mobile providers strike me as similar (I don't have any experience with Japanese government webpages, or probably any other Japanese websites). I found some of those had a similar vibe, which seemed very dated to me, however, I assumed that was a style choice rather than being old. Could be something similar going on for Indian sites. They're just not targeted at my design sensibilities.

As an addition, I thought most of the confusingness about indianvisaonline.gov.in wasn't in the web-design, but in the questions. I've found similar frustrating options on some lovely looking websites, or even paper forms. When forms are for important things, extra effort should be put in to make them as clear and obvious as possible. Perhaps the general rule for our current situation would be that the more important the form, the less intuitive it is. The Indian government isn't alone in this.

Does anyone have hopes AI will make things better for us in this area?