India: Usability guideline for advertising phone numbers

The guideline is simple - indicate complete phone numbers, including STD codes, anytime you include a phone number in print or media. Business cards, pamphlets, brochures, bills and invoices, shopping bags, billboards, media ads should all have complete phone numbers. No exceptions. Even if you mention the city, always specify complete phone numbers. The customer is king; don't make him do extra work.

Of course, if your potential customers are overseas, include a country code as well.

If you have committed the sin of giving out incomplete phone numbers with no way to even find out the complete number, you are losing potential customers, which you wanted to attract in the first place. That customer in the nearby city who saw your brochure cannot contact you. Even that out-of-town customer with a cell phone in hand, who currently happens to be in your town and staring at one of your billboards, cannot contact you because he needs the STD code.

This guideline applies not only to businesses but to anybody who gives out phone numbers with the intent of enabling the recipient to contact them. So, follow this guideline when writing that email signature.

The old habit of mentioning just the phone number or city and phone number is a legacy that should have been thrown out when operator assisted trunk calls were replaced by STD (Subscriber Trunk Dialing).

Domestic numbers are usually specified as:
[STD code] [Phone number]
Ex: 0422 2312246

International numbers are usually specified as:
+[Country code] [Area code] [Phone number]
Ex: +91 422 2312246

Note that the STD code is the Area code preceded by a zero. The zero is consumed by the local telephone service provider to connect you to the "subscriber trunk dialing" facility. When making a call from overseas, you only need the area code.

In fact, the zero in the domestic number is not actually part of the phone number and is just a service provider specific number used to access the subscriber trunk dialing feature. Since it happens to be zero throughout India across all providers, it has stuck as part of the phone number. Although, not specifying the zero is the right thing to do, because of the widespread practice of including it, from a usability perspective it is advisable to continue with that format.

Providing India specific content

mohideen.com is the top site on Google for the search term "aliyar dam photos".

I'm glad that this site is progressing towards one of it's goals - of providing as much India specific content as possible (while I'm back in India). Although India is now a top notch global software service provider, domestic internet usage is rather low and there is a lack of India related content.

My travel plans are currently restricted awaiting the new addition to the Mohideen family. As soon as Sharmila and the baby are ready to travel, we hope to do our part to help fill the content gap.