Long ago in India we used to hate to book train ticket... why because of those stupid lines and lazy govt. officials in ticketing counter who used to take unnecessary tea breaks, lunch breaks, system shut down... horrifying. It used to be a nightmare for each one of us when we were to book tickets for summer holidays… stand in that long long queue and still cannot figure out if we tickets are available or in waiting list and then after standing in the line for hours we come to know that the waiting list if 150 or so…. Daam you are lost and have no option but to curse Indian Railways….
Gone are the days. Today if you see IRCTC which brought in eTicket has become so very convienient and easy to use. Also if not eTickect we can atleast see if the tickets are available which all trains go from where and to where… we salute Indian Railways for running so much trains and that too daily. Hats off to Indian Railways Network.
Now lets me analyze on 3 points on IRCTC
Point 1. Is it user friendly ?Now those of you who are regularly using IRCTC.co.in for railway booking might wonder what’s big deal... we have to deal with it, taxing maybe at times but not that bad after you get the end result. Hmm so why am I asking to myself is it usable enough.
Let me now go round and round.... first of all the whole booking area is fantastic, but the home page is like an Kumbh MELA... don’t know why are some weird ads kept in chaotic manner. These ads can be grouped at one area. You will feel relived once you enter the your user name and password. Aah at least you get the screen wherein you get to see the actual screen. SO now you are logged in. The page looks good at the start wherein you see all the possible links like your booked tickets, cancel tickets, special trains and all others… maybe too long list in left links but if you come to see all are important links. You may feel that it’s of no use to you but in future you will use it mark my words. But But hey this can be improved more by grouping items and placing it in proper place. Like for example some elements are in one group and the same interlinked element of that is in some other group. SO you need to really search for that…. Naah that’s OK we are Indians we are used to these.. that’s our mentality NO PROBS, chaltha hai….
OK lets look at the actual one to book trains…. Now if you look at this there are 2 simple columns like From and TO destinations where you enter some text and it opens in popup (for e.g. I type in Mumbai and press the icon it opens up the popup stating some station code like ddr (dadar), CST and so on….) that’s perfect because they have made it work according to station names, but many a times as the bandwidth is slow, the pop up doesn’t display at times due to overload of traffic. Now how to tackle it ???
There comes AJAX technology, if you type in DADAR and click on the icon, they can display the list of stations at the same page with tree structure and the even the page doesn’t refresh, that’s the beauty of ajax…. OK ppl you would say AJAX cannot be used in this technology… then some other alternative like usage of javascript to display on the same page without refreshing. Now if nothing is possible then display a link which will have all the station names with their station code names… this will be either downloadable one or a simple HTML.
Another useful thing which they missed is to explain what is eTicket and what is iTicket… even till now I get confused, as iTicket is for printing and eTicket is for paper ticker. SO that can be shown as Paper Ticket and Print Ticket or some other words so that the confusion can be avoided
Now lets get to point 2
2. How is the steps of online transaction ?
This is the most important and very much what we are looking and have come to do… booking a ticket. Now the steps of transaction is shown excellently and there is no need for a change as its already user friendly. We can’t get friendlier than this…. Now this is Ok if we are going in for iTicket, but some improvisation can be done in eTicket address saver….
How, though they have the provision to save but many a times it dosen’t work, don’t know why??? Now here user should have provision to save some 5 to 6 different addresses so that every time he doesn’t need to type in address and there will be a time out.
3. Is it safe enough to book or can we rely on it ?
Now comes the important point where all of us in India face… faith on electronic media ??? do you trust these online….
But I will give you an example why this is most secured and reliable. I had faced this problem… I booked this ticket and while ending the transaction there was an error and page was not getting displayed, this is after I paid through my bank online and amount was also debited, but no ticket was booked. I was worried… but I received an eMail from IRCTC that the amount will be credited to my account. Though it takes time for these processing of refund but it happens… we can rely on them. This is good thing about IRCTC we don’t have to be behind them like it happens with some private travel agents like YATRA and CLEAR TRIP, wherein we need to really push them and keep on following up for the refund. Even many of my friends said the same thing… it takes time but you will get your money refunded within a week…
So that’s my view on IRCTC…. So next time if you are against online train booking at-least in India…. Think again… This is one of the best online ticketing and that too which has world’s largest railway network.
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