Indianrail.gov.in is reported to be the official website of the Indian Railway government. Even when most of the bookings now days are done on the IRCTC website, but as the official website of Indian Railway it is expected to run and work in a seamless manner. This project focuses on evaluating the website using Nielsen's heuristic evaluation and then referring it to a new design.
Heuristic evaluation is a process where experts use rules of thumb to measure the usability of user interfaces in independent walkthroughs and report issues. Evaluators use established heuristics (e.g., Nielsen-Molich’s) and reveal insights that can help design teams enhance product usability from early in development.
The evolution of the website was done by me, and my teammate based on 10 Heuristic Review parameters and while doing so, we also wrote down suggestions and improvements that can be done for each page to make it better.
On evaluation the website we found many unnecessary pages and information for the college students, and it is not possible to make changes in the present website design because of too many changes. Since our goal for the application is to make life easier for the user, we are going to take a very user-centered design approach. We will do two user testing one with the current design of website to assure we cover the pain points and later other with proposed prototypes to check if the problems are solved.
Hence, we decided to go ahead with redesigning the website. For that we came up a list of goals, user should be able to perform ideally and how the user will be interacting with the Indian railway website-
1. Train bookings & fare.
2. Tatkal reservations.
3. See train schedules & timetable.
4. Refund & cancellation.
5. See the map of train, stops & stations.
6. SMS services and tickets on mails.
7. Train meals.
8. Plan journey & connecting trains.
After using fundamentals from the Nielsen Heuristic Evaluation on the Indian Railway website ‘indianrail.gov.in’, we decided to carry the project forward and take three main design parameters out of our evaluation which were-
1. User- controlled & Freedom
2. Error Prevention
3. Aesthetic & Minimalist design.
And based on these parameters, we created the two main CUJs (Critical User Journey) of the already existing website.
- Booking/ availability of trains & seats
- Status of trains & Schedule of trains
- Stops & station of trains
- PNR enquiry
- Tatkal service & waiting line
- Quota booking
- Full coach booking
- Lost or stolen
- Reservation
- Refund
- FAQs
- Cancellation
- Contract /Helpline
STEP 1- Setup
In order to conduct a smooth user testing of the existing website, we moderator’s protocol as well as a structured script and instructions and then ask our users to perform specific activities.
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STEP 2- Conducting User Testing
STEP 3- Listing and analyzing Pain Points, Recommendations & Comments from User Testing 1
The performed usability tests focus on resolving the following problems on the current website on Indian railways (indianrail.gov.in) and not the whole website. The problems taken in considerations are:
1. The inconvenient process of ‘Booking a train’.
2. Unable to find basic facilities of customer service and help.
- Most options require that you know the train number.
- Entry into destination station does not work.
- Wanted to search for options, but did not find a search bar.
- Faced difficulty in finding everything.
- Users do not understand the purpose of the picture on the home page.
- Hard to find the train number.
RECOMMENDATIONS
- The information could be done better and I’m not able to find the information I want.
- A Search Bar is very important to have.
- Making the website more user friendly.
- Most options require that you know the train number.
- It’s difficult to find things out. I want to find things more quickly, other booking websites are a lot easier.
- If they look at the captcha most of the users think/say: “Captcha menu is so annoying”.
- It’s not clear where I need to go. There are a lot of unnecessary data on the screen.
- “People won't refer to this website”.
- A lot of rail services cannot be accessed.
Semantic Differential Scale (SDS) that works like a rating scale. According to the given parameters, the user has to rate their experience with the website.
This is SDS of one user.
STEP 1- Setup
STEP 2- Designing wireframes based on feedbacks from user testing 1
STEP 3- User Testing 2 setup
In order to conduct a smooth user testing of the existing website, we moderator’s protocol as well as a structured script and instructions and then ask our users to perform specific activities.
STEP 4- Conducting User Testing
STEP 5- Listing and analyzing Pain Points, Recommendations & Comments from User Testing 2
- Most visits could be more prominent.
- Maybe the website knows where you are if you want to buy a ticket. Like one can switch on GPS option and they can find out the nearest train station.
- The find trains could have another color button.
- The menu option can take the form of tabs, as most Indian websites have tabs in the form of a menu.
- Would be nice if you could give more information about the class, for example pictures or videos.
- Maybe, change the title of customer care to help.
- Include Disha and make it more visible, since it's always nice to have a chat box to ask questions.
- The user thought that the class option should be listed on the train schedule page, since sometimes many classes are full.
- Perhaps the removal of the logo from the train timetable page is not very professional.
- It would be easy to type in my PNR number to display a waiting list or to cancel one of my tickets.
-Compared to last time it is more structured and there are no unnecessary data. Also, customer care is now accessible.
- I knew what to do. The buttons tell the user what to do.
- I could find everything.
- It is nice that Indian railway is talking to you informally.
- They are teaching me about this web site.
- I am very happy with the prototype.
- The booking section is predominant, and this is good.
- It is good that there is customer care and a way to login.
PAIN POINTS
- Some users could not find the menu immediately.
- I do not like the menu. Search looks nice.
