Redesigning IRCTC Booking Confirmation
I am a frequent traveler of Indian Railways and I book my tickets through the online portal of IRCTC. IRCTC stands for Indian Railways Catering and Travel Corporation. IRCTC provides for ticketing, traveling, and catering in Indian Railways. The web portal of IRCTC has improved its interface a lot, but there is still a lot of scope for improvement. Those who are not familiar with the process of booking the ticket, here are the steps.
- Login to IRCTC Portal or App.
- Enter the details of boarding, deboarding, and date of journey.
- Select the train number and class of the journey.
- Payment
After the booking, IRCTC sends a confirmation email to you, which also acts as a ticket once one travels on the train. This is how the email looks like right now.
The problem with this email is that there is a lot of redundant information and unrequired information.
- It mentions Class: Sleeper Class and the same is conveyed by Coach also S7
- From and Boarding At. BBS (Bhubaneswar) is conveyed in both cases.
- The confirmation email contains five dates: Date & Time of Booking, Date of Journey, Date of Boarding, Scheduled Departure, and Scheduled Arrival.
The problem at hand which I was solving was how can we design the ticket for better user experience so that all the important details are upfront on the ticket and there is nothing unimportant on the confirmation email.
I asked some of my friends who also travel frequently in the railways about the most important details they look out for when they travel. The top four responses were
- Coach and Seat Number
- Departure and Arrival Time
- Train Number
- Details of Passengers
I used some of the 10 principles of good design given by Dieter Rams. They are —
- Good Design makes a product useful.
- Good Design makes a product understandable.
- Good Design is unobtrusive.
- Good Design is aesthetic.
- Good Design is as little design as possible.
On the basis of the research I did and the responses I got, I redesigned this email and it looks like this now.
It may not be an excellent design and there are many details which were in the original email, but not in this design. For the organization, it becomes very difficult to let go of the information, because they think that everything is important, but by and large, many users want the most important stuff, because every detail added to a product increases the cognitive load and slows down the decision making the process.
Let me know what you think about this design. Comments and reviews are invited.
