9 February 2009
Great UX tip
I was booking a train ticket yesterday on TheTrainline.com and was impressed by a nice little detail. When you’re choosing your train time, there’s this huge grid of potential tickets and it’s pretty overwhelming. To help you, they highlight the row and column where your mouse is hovering.
Paying attention to details like that are what make using a sight really easy. Well done TrainLine!
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Richard
# February 9, 2009 - 5:49 pm
It is a nice trick – we use Tablecloth to create a similar effect where needed.
coldclimate
# February 9, 2009 - 6:58 pm
Which does make a nice change, because thetrainline used to be dreadful (almost with a capital D).
ianmcn
# February 9, 2009 - 7:38 pm
theTrainline has improved, but I still love the URL querying of traintimes.org.uk, for example – to find the next train from Leeds to London, just type their URL followed by /leeds/london, simple but effective use of sensible URL’s.
Richard Henry
# February 9, 2009 - 8:20 pm
If you’re impressed by that; check out the booking UI at http://www.nationalexpresseastcoast.com/. They have really one-upped The Trainline. It’s so much easier to use, and snappier. No pagination.
Richard
Paul seys
# February 9, 2009 - 9:15 pm
I think the guys responsible for the improved UI aren’t a million miles away from the carsonified office. The changes were made a few months ago after thetrainline consulted the Bristol based consultancy cx partners.
John Topley
# February 9, 2009 - 9:32 pm
I’ve noticed this before and Richard is right, the National Express East Coast site is superb – much better than the other train booking sites.
Banhawi
# February 9, 2009 - 10:49 pm
Small adds makes a huge difference .
Christopher Francis O'Donnell
# February 10, 2009 - 12:56 am
@Richard
Tablecloth looks great. Thanks for the link.
Tom
# February 10, 2009 - 10:37 am
I think the journey selection on National Express is dreadful, it is far too busy with pop ups flying everywhere and trying to see the price of a particular journey is so time consuming. Instead of being all flash and bam with the technology side of it, make it simple to understand how much im going to pay. thetrainline may be over simplified but I’d take that any day over the mock wizardry which is the National Express site.
Ryan McMaster
# February 12, 2009 - 9:09 pm
Very nice! And I appreciate the Tablecloth link too, Richard. Thanks!
blablabla
# February 13, 2009 - 8:52 pm
you fucking hypocrite and idiot
Snazzy web tables with Tablecloth | mskempster.com
# February 19, 2009 - 8:10 pm
[...] I came across something I had never seen before today when reading Ryan Carson’s post about some nice user-experience design on a train ticket booking site. [...]
Lau
# February 27, 2009 - 7:36 pm
Okay, that bit of the site is nice!
But the system which drives all those train ticket websites is a nightmare, for example try booking tickets at 3am. It doesn’t work, why! Ek!!!
So much potential, just interested to see how things pan out with it over the next 6 months…
I hear things are planned! ;)