The UX of Scotrail
Web Design Critique
Scotrail
The main feature of the website — the journey checker is glitchy and unreliable; particularly on mobile version of the site responding poorly to user interaction. This frustrates the user, detracting from the entire Scotrail experience as a whole. If a change in the planned journey is made a whole new (or much older) UI is presented with a different layout and differing options. Another issue with this UI is the restriction to quarter hour timings. An issue that’s not obvious until you want to check a train coming in ten minutes but can’t see as that time is ‘in the past’.
The website’s hamburger menus are slow to operate, which frustrates the user leaving them reluctant to operate an integral area of the website which holds crucial information.
The timetable services, separate from the journey checker, merely link the user to PDFs of the timetables. While still perfectly usable being a little out of date, requiring the downloading of the file. A Web-based and live version would go a long way to improving utility as I doubt many people currently use this section of the website.
Thin greyed type is used through the site, which may be difficult for the visually impaired to read and understand.
On mobile, you cannot exit the main navigation menu without clicking a hyperlink to a destination or using a small exit button at the top of the menu. The back button on the phone takes you to the previous visited page, and you cannot swipe or touch off of it. This issue is not present on the desktop version of the site as it uses an alternative form of navigation.
Links in the hamburger menu categorized under some pages are not actually accessible through these pages, which means they might be missed — especially considering they are inside a sub handle of the hamburger menu.
The footer has links to almost every page on the site, creating an unnecessary eyesore that doesn’t add very much to the functionality or usability of the site.
While the website does present a coherent and unified design throughout, I would criticize it for being particularly uninspired. It feels simultaneously overly corporate, and overly friendly. Many of the pages actually feel quite dated, very late-naughties / early ten’s.
The site does utilize an anchored header with information such as delays, and a call to action in the form of the ‘buy ticket’ utility discussed earlier. This works perfectly well on a desktop, however on mobile it is quite large and often doesn’t seem to know whether it’s coming or going when scrolling up and down pages.
Navigation through the site is fairly simple, with links being provided through taking you to logical pages. Generally, you should be able to find what you are looking for.
Since originally researching this, Scotrail have updated their website and some of the issues discussed have been resolved.
