Indian Railways (IR) is India’s national railway system operated by the Ministry of Railways.
Interesting facts about IRCTC website:
IRCTC website is amongst the most viewed web-sites in the world, rankings under 750 top sites worldwide and under 50 top sites in India.
On an average, 4.15 lakhs tickets are booked daily
Source: https://dsim.in/blog/2015/07/08/21-unknown-facts-about-irctc/
Internet booking overtakes Traditional Counter booking
The increased use of the internet by people across the country is evident from the fact that the percentage of internet ticketing passengers overtook the percentage of counter ticketing passengers for the first time in 2014–15. From 38.54% share in total passengers in 2011–12, the internet ticketing passengers went up to 54.52% in 2014–15. During the same period, the share of counter ticketing (PRS) passengers went down from 61.46% in 2011–12 to 45.48% in 2014–15.
Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation’s (IRCTC) e-ticketing website was able to book 5.80 lakh e-tickets on March 19. It is the highest ever single day booking.
The earlier highest was on September 2, 2013 when it booked 5.72 lakh e-tickets.
IRCTC’s spokesperson said, presently, the site books more than 4.63 lakh tickets with an average of 9.47 lakh passengers daily as against 3.85 lakh tickets with 6.86 lakh passengers booked daily during 2013.
Great Job !!
Currently, one can feel at ease when they land on the landing page of the IRCTC website. The design is user friendly and provides better user experience.
Though the design is simple and welcoming, I still feel there is a lot of scope for improvement.
What is the Problem ?
I am not a regular user of this website hence I tried to cover the Landing page of the website for my study and research/analysis.
Some of my Key observations:
- Too much information on display, causing confusion and difficulty to spot the required link.
- The options are not arranged properly and hence accessing so much information becomes difficult to deal with the user.
- Does not have consistent layout throughout the website
- Too much of space has been unused
- Lot of disturbance with the hierarchy and categorisation
Current Design Evaluation:
- Two logos are not required at the header
- Cannot distinguish between the link and a dropdown on the top navigation section
- The dropdown button “IRCTC/Exclusive” is designed as a toggle button; causing confusion if there is a mode change option!
- PNR is an important link that people look for, it is not visible immediately on the page
- The page has ended or can be scrolled is not intuitive
- Information hierarchy issue
- No categorisation of important and more used links; example — ‘Cancel ticket’ and ‘Track your Train’ are some features people mostly look for on such websites
- Multiple links directing to a common URL
- Overriding of information
- Multiple navigation menu on the header with repeated links
- Two different values for the same job, example — ‘Login’ and ‘Sign In’ values, may confuse the users and misguide them
- Lots of empty space gives a feel of unfinished design “Login PopUp”
- The landing page is divided into three main sections and they all look disconnected from each other
- ‘Holidays’ section contains lots of information that are already listed under Holiday link on the main navigation bar
Goal:
In order to provide a better user experience to the users, here are some tasks that we can try to achieve while designing the new website:
- Minimal and simplified design
- Reduce the number of links and navigations (- remove unwanted and repeated features from the home screen)
- Rework on categorisation of the links and services/options
- Grab users attention and create influence (include relevant graphics/icons/images)
New Design Concept:
Solution:
Some of the changes that can be made to the website inorder to achieve the above mentioned goals are listed here:
- Better and dedicated search function
- Provide information to train/PNR status, etc
- User need not login to check the PNR status
- Categorise and fix the hierarchy
- News and alert to be highlighted without compromising the UI
- Global nav should have only important links, less important links can be placed elsewhere
- Only one logo on header can serve the purpose
- Horizontal Form for ticket booking can save a lot of time and space, also increases visibility
- Provision of “Recent Searches” makes it easier to fill a form
- A sections should look like they are part of the same website — design could have a theme
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Thank you for Visiting.
Note: This study is only based on my analysis and understanding of user experience design. I am looking forward to breakdown the website at component level in-order to analyse it more clearly from UX point.
You can help me with your suggestions and feedback on my analysis at the comment section.
Happy Reading :)
