Review of National Rail (www.nationalrail.co.uk)
Travelling a fair distance (120+ miles) each day getting to and from work means the train is really the only method of transport that works for me. As such, I am a regular visitor to the National Rail site (www.nationalrail.co.uk), and have been for a number of years.
Predictably (why else would I be mentioning it?), they’ve recently relaunched it – so I thought I’d share my views of it with you. Does it do the job it sets out to do? Have they taken a step back? Read on!
(Ok so I accept I’m late to the party with this one because eConsultancy have already written an excellent review of the new site – but I’m going to try hard to differentiate, just so you don’t get bored…)
First impressions
Firstly, to jog our memories, let’s look at the old site, in case you’d never seen it before:
That’s not the best screenshot, but you can already see it’s cramped, dated and no thought was given to the actual utility of the site (i.e what visitors wanted to do the most). Wonderful.
The site was relaunched in December 2009 and if the first impressions are anything to go by, they’re on to a winner. It apears to be set into a grid layout (the benefits of which are well-known, and the New York Times’ designer Khoi Vinh was key in drawing attention to these).
Hierarchy & functionality
Firstly, the site has good top-navigation elements that function not only to get you around the site, but also act as a breadcrumb.
The main thing that strikes visitors is the really obvious key function of the site: the massive train time finder box dominates the homepage.
It’s accompanied by good AJAX functionality that automatically recognises station names and/or the 3-letter station codes. This is really helpful if you’re heading somewhere that you’re not sure of the spelling of.
Unfortunately, if for some reason you don’t have JavaScript enabled, this bit of functionality becomes redundant – and also throws the page layout into mild disarray to boot:
This is a bit disappointing, and could have implications for users who – for whatever reason – don’t/can’t have JavaScript enabled.
The results page is pretty well laid out too, giving clear indication of what you’ve searched for, where you’re going and any associated alerts.
The results also have a little alert symbol tagged onto the end to let you know of any service disruptions that might affect the journey. There’s also a “Show me live departures & arrivals” box that’s further down the homepage. This, for me at least, is really key – since given the recent slew of bad weather, I want to know if the signalling systems in Wales have let us all down again by being unable to cope with a bit of snow.
Also, when searching for a certain journey on the homepage and then jumping to, say, the Season Ticket calculator, it will remember the journey you searched for on the homepage. Neat.
As mentioned in the eConsultancy review, the site doesn’t seem to deal too well with heavy traffic. During the heavy snowfall of Jan 6th/7th, the site was intermittently unavailable, which didn’t bode well…
Imagery and graphics
Iconography-wise, the site’s doing really well. I feel the graphics used throughout the site are apt, explanatory and helpful. It’s great to see some thought going into their use, and how they can help signpost users to relevant bits of info/content. They’re used well in the ‘Travel Centre’ on the homepage, which allows users to set up SMS alerts for their regular journeys and similar stuff.
The rest of this site uses graphics sparingly, other than in the footer and in an ‘Ask Lisa’ boxout, which is their automated, natural-language FAQ function.
The site carries ads, which I personally find annoying. This isn’t an issue, since AdBlocker removes them…but this leaves large areas of bizarre whitespace in the site which look weird. I fully accept this isn’t National Rail’s fault, but I wanted to whinge about it. Whinge whinge.
Conclusion
This is a real improvement. I used the old site for years, and this is definitely a relaunch to be proud of. Some comments on the eConsultancy review said the site didn’t work for them: one can only assume user error, since it works flawlessly for me.
Well done National Rail, and Fortune Cookie for the redesign work.
Thing is, it’s no good having a pretty face if the brain isn’t up to much! A little bit of snow, and the site crashes.
I’ve not been able to book any advanced tickets using any site this morning because of “an error on the advanced tickets booking engine”.
This happens more often than not. Front end, lovely. Database sucks!