UK Railway Timetable Accessbility Deconstructed

The Register has an article describing how the only good thing about the
new version of the UK railway journey planner is that it has a more 
memorable URL!   It describes how a usable system has been broken by
the use of invisible links, scripting only links, unnecessary 
cookies, deleting the well known, if obscure URL, with no redirection,
and a general failure to return the appropriate information
early enough in the dialogue or to accept slightly unusual queries
(the train has already departed, I want to meet it, when will it arrive?).

The conclusion is that one would be better off using the English 
language version of the German railways one.

The main caveat about the article is that they push the use of Bobby, but
don't give the necessary caveats about needing to do manual checks.

(The change probably reflects a step in the renationalisation of the
rail network.  I guess, as part of the re-branding, the web site was
done from scratch.)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/30564.html

Received on Wednesday, 7 May 2003 16:01:23 UTC