IRCTC – Making rail reservations better

IRCTC – Making rail reservations better

Purpose
This note contains a brief analysis of the current reservation process on IRCTC, the newly
added quick book feature, and suggests ideas to make the customer experience even better.
Foundation
● www.irctc.co.in is the most successful e-commerce website in India. More than 7050
reservations everyday, and about 8500 trains included in the booking process.
● IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation Ltd., set by the Ministry of
Railways in 1999) has played a huge role in transforming customer experience for
buying a railway ticket. The lengthy queues for booking tickets or black marketing of
tickets is no more the default way of buying tickets.
● IRCTC has also introduced many innovations including e-ticket and mobile booking.
● The website is a bad experience for the user. Many operations are slow, error prone
and difficult to understand. If one step goes wrong, you have to do the whole process
again.
● It has taken us any time between 15 minutes to 6 hours to book a ticket successfully.
Many others share similar experience.
● The new Quick Book feature addresses many of the concerns.
● Yet, the process can be significantly improved – resulting not only in much higher
customer satisfaction, but also much lower transaction times, and consequently, less
load and bandwidth consumption for the server.
Can we make India's most successful e-commerce site, also a delight to use?
That's the question we started this report with!

Problems in Existing Website

Home Page
● Primary purposes of website - “Reservation” and “Train Inquiry” are not visible
● It's difficult to find the starting point – especially for a novice user
● Lots of advertisements on the home page
● Lot of blinking / animated portions distract the user
● Icons and featured text are not at proper places
● The login portion itself has too many options
● Layout doesn’t look professional

User Registration Page

● Form does not fit into a single window, ideally it should
● User name and password are asked at end, they should be at the beginning
● Shipping address is not necessary on this page
● Designation contains only 25 characters, should be 50 characters
● Value Added Services are on the same page here, which can be avoided
● The user has to login again after registration, this should be avoided
● Sometimes, even after registration, logging in results in a message that the user is not
registered
Copyright 2007 – Magnet Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Plan My Travel Page
● Icons aren’t clear as to their
purpose - Train Icons for From
and To
● Selection date is today by
default, but i-ticket (default
option) requires minimum 3
days in future
● It is difficult to understand the
three different types of tickets,
there is help icon, but it opens
in a popup window.
● The list of trains after
submission, comes below the
fold. It's difficult to understand
that something happened after the submission
● There are many pop-ups – availability, route, fare
etc. This should be avoided
● Ideally, an option to book the return ticket too
should be provided. The request can be saved
and used later, if the booking for that date has not
yet started.
● There are also advertisements and other links on
the Play My Travel page, they distract the user
from the main task.
● Checking availability is a crucial part of the
booking process, but the user has to click a button
and see a popup window for this.
● Many a times, this even comes up with an
“Unable to retrieve due to communication failure”
problem!
Copyright 2007 – Magnet Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

Payment Options
● There are too many payment options,
and difficult to understand which one
is better. This also comes up in a
pop-up window. Ideally, this can be a
preference that can be set in the user
profile.
● Many a times, the booking process
fails on payment, despite a note that
you can see this in the failed
payments page, it does not show up

Quick Book Process

Most of the usability problems are taken
care of in the new Quick Book feature
IRCTC introduced. Yet, the Quick Book
feature is for “experts” - as you need to
know the train number and need to be
sure of the availability before you book the
ticket. This defies the purpose for people
who are new.
The form design too does not render well
across browsers.
Copyright 2007 – Magnet Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

A Better Approach
We suggest a fine tuned approach to doing train reservations via IRCTC. Focused on the thing
people come to the website for – to check availability of, and book tickets. Some of the points in
this approach:
● Single screen, rich internet application.
● Reservation process on the home page of IRCTC
● Login not required for checking availability, only for booking, and can be done after
booking
● Station code lookup while the user types the name
● Train availability – select multiple trains, and click once to get availability in all
● Single date field, automatic format conversion
● In line contextual help available
● Visual effects to show the progress of the process
● Single spot for advertisement – can rotate
● Can change any parameter at any time, and the remaining will update automatically –
e.g. Change in date, will automatically check availability for selected train
● Payment options – one chosen by default, others available on request
Copyright 2007 – Magnet Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Prototype
We have built a simple prototype to illustrate the above points. A lot more needs to and can be
done on this prototype, but it can give you an idea of how things can be developed.
http://www.mehtanirav.com/makebetter/irctc/
Note that this is a simple prototype. Some transitions and data are inconsistent. We
quickly put this together to demonstrate what is possible.