Heuristic Evaluation of Amtrak and Megabus Ticket Purchasing Process
As part of the Intro to Human Centered Design course of the Interaction Design Specialization (UC San Diego), I was tasked with performing a Heuristic Evaluation of two different web ticket purchasing processes for a roundtrip transit between Sacramento and San Francisco. I chose two services that I have used a few times before, Amtrak and Megabus.
In order to perform the evaluation, I followed Nielsen's Heuristics and noted the principle broken and the severity of the usability problem (on a scale of 1-4 with 1 being a cosmetic problem and 4 being a catastrophic usability problem).
Amtrak:
1. Consistency and standards: The Amtrak departure selection process does not follow conventions and has an abnormal layout/ the "Add to cart" button is in an unusual, unintuitive location.
Severity: 2
2. Match between system and the real world- After selecting the departure/return times, the next step in the process is Travel Extras where users can "Add a hotel, rental car, or limo service." This does not follow the process of buying the train tickets in real life and does not make sense in the middle of the Amtrak ticket purchase process.
Severity: 2
3. Consistency and standards: In order to move ahead in the process from the hotel/rental car adding step, the system provides a button to "Enter Passenger Info." However, this is inconsistent with the description of the step above as it says "Or continue your reservation," which describes the same user action. Thus, the button should have the same terminology and say "Continue My Reservation."
Severity: 1
4. Consistency and standards: Required info is supposed to be marked by an asterisk, but the system requires at least one of mobile/home/business phone number and does not note this to the user with asterisk.
Severity: 3
5. Prevent errors: If a user does not enter a phone number, it does not provide any sort of feedback to prevent the user from attempting to complete the form without entering any phone number.
Severity: 3
Megabus
1. Flexibility and efficiency of use: Upon entering the website, you are required to select your language. Instead, smart defaults through location should provide a language with the flexibility to choose a different language if desired (but not as a required action).
Severity: 2
2. Aesthetic and minimalistic design: The homepage has a lot of extra noise, causing the primary action of searching for/buying tickets to lose its focus.
Severity: 2
3. Consistency and standards: In the seat selection step, different options for seats (general, reserved, table, balcony, upper deck front) are depicted visually and it tells you to "Reserve your seat(s) below." That tells the user they need to click a seat to reserve a seat, however you do not click a seat/reserve a seat for general and instead it is defaulted to general.
Severity: 2
4. Visibility of system status: Megabus does not show users progress along the ticket purchase process and what/how many steps are left.
Severity: 3
Conclusion:
Overall, both processes could benefit from usability improvements. Neither of them had any catastrophic usability issues, but they also faced numerous issues that can frustrate users and even potentially cause them to exit out of the process.
Before completing these evaluations, I had purchased tickets through Amtrak and Megabus numerous times. Although I had a sense that both processes lacked in some aspects of usability, I did not specifically pinpoint why it felt that way nor did I completely rationalize that it was not my fault as the user, but rather the fault of the website itself. It is very interesting now to look back and understand why I, and I'm sure many others, had at least some minor issues or frustrations while completing the processes.
