Tl;dr pain.
Citylink
Citylink hit you with this journey definition form:
I want to buy a return but at this stage I can’t differentiate either. Hey ho.
Also on this form, the look-ahead search function doesn’t work for destination field:
Which means more typing for me.
On this screen I’ve selected no option for return and yet the price seems to include that price. I have no idea:
In turns out this is the return price but it would be nice to have the price update as I select the return option. But hey ho.
I figured it would be fun to see how lean their checkout system was:
I think this is a nice summary screen. I can see total price and itinerary. Cool!
Proceed to checkout yields this:
Which is OK… but you don’t need the First Name and Last Name fields (why split into two fields anyway?) as all the ID you need will be with my credit card eg ‘confirm order by telling us last four digits of your credit card’, for example) I’m also not liking the call to action says ‘Continue to billing info’ which is likely 10 fields of rubbish I don’t need to fill in:
Only 9 fields! And arguably you’ve already asked me about my email in the previous step?! WTF. This screen is useless.
Megabus
After filing in the slightly easier time and destination form I get these results:
Cheapest return priced at £29.97! Much better than Citylink.
Onto the Add to Basket thingy which is odd, as I’d rather just go to checkout right away and the ‘Add to basket’ primary use case doesn’t make any sense here as I’ve specified multiple travellers and dates etc:
But then I get this screen:
It seems that the pricing is for individual legs. Very confusing. The previous screen -it turns out- was for just the outward leg as I now see from information in the header section which I missed:
UX observation – the ‘Choose outbound journey’ string of text is miles away from my focus of attention (the ticket prices and the ‘Cheapest result’ string) so is easily missed.
Anyway, let’s select our return ticket and see where we get to:
‘Operated by Citlink’ hahaaaa, anyway.
Looks like the prices are split across screens which is annoying because in the outbound selection screen you may remember this:
Which implied to me the whole ticket price is £29.97, meh.
When I scroll down the page with the outward and return ticket prices I finally see the full ticket price:
Which would have been better displayed along side the ticket summary as Citylink did. Also good to see Total to pay is slightly cheaper than Citylink by 66p!
And then I’m sure it’s onto a super lean payment gateway where I just have to enter my credit card details and go on my journey!
Haaaahahahahah! Nope.
UX observation: with these kinds of transactions where I don’t need delivery and just need a simple eticket, I should only have to enter credit card credentials and my name. Fuck all this billing info and other extraneous stuff.
Driving
Let’s see if I can get a car parking space for less than the cost of the bus. Over to NCP.
£20.09! Wooo!
Show Details leads onto:
I’m going to select ‘Online non-members price’ for UX exploration and the fact that ‘Special members price’ will probably want me to register and fill in 100000 form fields in some hideous registration process…
Oh do go fuck off. I’m not here to enter into a relationship with you. I’m here to buy something quickly.
On click ‘New customer’ I fall into the wormhole:
Why have an option for members and non members? Why do I have to register? This is such a zombie pattern.
Anyway, I will be driving because its so much cheaper, but boy, is the online process around all these things stuck in the past.
But what do you think? Comments are below >>>
Updates
I went back to NCP to update my booking and I had to login and got this screen:
The technical UX term for this is “utter fucking shambles”. One login is enough and also note the haywire labelling ‘Go to my account’ ‘My app account’ ‘Pay later’.
FML.
Update 2
Edinburgh Airport have a booking system thing which is weird:
Am I booking a flight or what here? Surely all you need to know is the dates and times of my parking requirements? It turns out this form is to find ‘things’ not just parking. When I tried some dates in the ‘Flying to Edinburgh Airport’ tab all it ever gave me were passport control fast track tickets. Herm.
Anyway, back to the ‘Flying from Edinburgh Airport’ tab: if you don’t select the ‘Return journey’ checkbox the search returns no results. I tried many dates and each time got zero back. So you need to select ‘Return journey’ for the damn form to actually work:
But after that, finding a car parking space is fairly seamless and the booking engine seems to carry over your parking dates and times to give you an accurate list of parking options.
Colmcq UX 