Alan's Letter to Railtrack
I am writing regarding the usability of the interface on the National Rail Enquires web site. **PLEASE** could you ensure that this message reaches someone who is actually responsible for the design of the web site. I was interested to see that someone (known to me), frustrated by the design of that page, had put on his own web site a suggestion of using instead the Deutsche Bahn (DB) site for rail queries: http://reiseauskunft.bahn.de/bin/query.exe/e because this is exactly what I had already, quite independently, also got the idea of doing. See his report at: http://www.gerv.net/usability/ On that site he lists some shortcomings with the National Rail Enquiries interface. Additional to these, here are problems from my own experience: - Only about the top 40% of the "get train times" button seems to be active when you click on it (at least with my browser, which is Mozilla running under the Linux operating system). If you click on the remaining 60% then the button appears to do nothing. - The limit of five connections you can view (and hence print) at once; e.g. if you click "earlier train" you lose the later ones. On a frequent service this may span too narrow a time range, so you have to do a number of separate printouts. (By contrast, on the DB page clicking "later" or "earlier" will ADD to the existing list, showing up to twelve connections.) - If you press the browser's "back" button in order to return to the search form in order to modify an existing search, the travel date resets itself to the current day, even though the other journey details remain as typed. Because much of the query remains correct, this is easy to miss, and can result in not noticing that the search results are for the wrong day, despite having initially typed the desired day. - If you search for services to "Bristol", the search results include services to Bristol Parkway, despite the fact that it is a considerable way outside the city. This only becomes evident if you click on "view details", which you may not think to do if the journeys shown involve no changes. (By contrast, the DB page alerts you that the station is not unique, and asks you to choose, with the default being sensibly Bristol Temple Meads. And the full name of the destination station is then shown in the search results, even if you do not click on "view details".) Admittedly, there are ways around the last two. For example, there is a "go back" button to click instead of using the browser's back button (though this causes a fresh page to be loaded, which is slower). And for the Bristol trains, always click on "view details". (But why? If it is imperative to click on "view details" then this information should be given from the outset.) But the point is that good interface design involves the user not having to know these things; it should be possible to use the site in an intuitive way and for the right thing to happen. I have not gone deliberately trawling through the site looking for faults. Rather, these things are issues which have genuinely caught me out while performing actual searches for intended journeys. Hopefully you can understand why I, too, have decided to use the interface on the DB website for the time being. However, please do get in touch if you are able at some point to announce that a significantly improved interface is available on the National Rail Enquiries website -- I would be delighted to hear from you. Regards, Alan