Refreshed Bus Éireann site has some wrinkles

Comment & Analysis: I was delighted to find a sleek new look when I visited Bus Éireann’s website the other day. Sadly, I ran into niggles that are minor but can have a major impact. Please bear in mind that I am only one user, and my experience could very well be an exception.

My site visits are exclusively to see what times a given bus service runs so I can plan accordingly. It is good for them that they have news, but their news is unlikely to be the primary reason people visit their site.

I scrolled down and thought I’d found what I wanted:

Alas, the Routes & Timetables page was not useful at all. It lists routes by number, so if you are searching for a route but don’t know the number, you’re out of luck.

There is no search function I could find, nor any options to list routes by a different metric. You’re therefore faced with a very long list and no way provided through the site to hone in on the route you want:

I tried the menu, which looked like this:

Plan Journey looked like the obvious choice, but your options are:

I didn’t need to buy tickets, nor did I need to find a fare or any of the other options listed there. I wanted to know what my options would be for getting from Cavan to Dundalk on a weekday.

I thought I’d try the fare finder, but this led me to the same problem I had with the routes list: it’s listed by route number, and I had no idea what route number I was looking for:

Fine, I thought, perhaps the booking tickets function was my only choice. No doubt it would be possible to see options or a link to the route timetable so you could just see what your options were for the day between two destinations.

I happened to know there is a service that runs directly between Cavan and Dundalk, but I couldn’t remember the number. I just wanted to see what times it ran and how long the journey would take.

From a design perspective, I like this. It’s nice and clean. But I really didn’t like that I was forced to input a specific time. I didn’t want to see my options for a specific time. I wanted to see the timetable for the route for the whole day. But okay, no doubt the thinking was that this would also serve that purpose.

The result I got was this, and to be fair, kudos to the designers for showing people their journey in one go with connections included, similar to Irish Rail’s site, but in my case, the result was woeful:

Now, if you spot what I missed, you win a lollipop. As it was, I saw options listed by time and looked until I got to an arrival time of 18:44, which would be too late for my purposes. Also, FOUR HOURS?? What the hell? I was so sure there was a route directly between Cavan and Dundalk without a detour to Dublin.

I ended up going back to the routes list, and using the “find in page” function of my browser to finally find what I was by now risking blowing a gasket to unearth. It is only when I sent a torrent of screenshots to a friend, venting about the tragedy of this lovely new design being so frustrating to use, that I noticed at the bottom of the listed options the service appeared that I had been looking for from the beginning.

I am at a complete loss to understand how anyone thought that a potential passenger would want to see results listed by service rather than by departure time. I want to have a conversation with the decision-makers behind this because I really want to know how they thought this was a good idea.

I happened to know there was something better than the four Expressway options listed before the two direct options, so I kept looking for details on the route. Would someone without that knowledge do the same?

Would most people look through the whole list, even if they’re in a hurry, or am I not unique in checking arrival times within the timeframe that might work for me and then stopping? If the first four items in a list appear by departure time, what would make you assume that options lower in the list would not follow that same order?

I found it extremely frustrating to use this site, but the changes I would suggest to eliminate my difficulties would be relatively small (though they could be technically difficult):

• Add a button right at the top of the site to take you straight to the ticket booking page.
• List results by departure time, not by service, by default.
• Add an option to list results by service, if that is how people want to see it presented.

Solving the problem of a massive routes list ordered by number, which non-regular users would not know, is more tricky and would probably not meet enough people’s needs to be worth the work, but if you’re not going to let people just zoom in to the route they’re looking for you need to be more mindful with how you list results.

Redesigning the site must have been a huge job, and it’s been well done for the most part. This is a small, but significant problem that I hope Bus Éireann can solve.