Usability Evaluation of Greyhound.ca

By: Satender Singh

  

Figure 1. Homepage of Greyhound.ca

Introduction

Greyhound.ca (Figure 1) is the most used long-distance bus service in Canada and it connects a large number of communities across Canada. The main features of the website include searching for bus schedules between two cities based on time and date, reservation of tickets, locating nearest Greyhound bus stations, searching for offers and discounts, looking for route updates /modifications, live bus tracking and, shipping and locating packages. The website is available in both major languages of Canada, that is, English and French. I used Nielsen Norman’s (1994) 10 heuristics [1] and think-aloud usability testing to evaluate the above website.

Usability Issues and Recommendations

1. Several irrelevant buses displayed in search results

When we try to search for a bus from Ottawa to Montreal of the current day without specifying a time, a search screen with many irrelevant buses is presented. This screen shows the bus schedule for the entire day but doesn’t exclude the buses which have already departed for the day. For example, in Figure 2 and Figure 3 there are only 3 available buses out of the 20 buses displayed. This creates confusion about the available buses and frustrates the user as they must scroll down to find the currently available buses.

 Figure 2. Search results of current day buses without specifying a time.

Figure 3. Search results of current day buses without specifying a time.

Recommendation

There can be several solutions to the above problem:

• Don’t display the buses which have already departed. This means improving the search results by filtering them based on the current time.
• Alternatively, do not display the time slots which have already departed for the current day on the homepage.
• If we want the user to know about the complete schedule of the day then we should hide the buses departed under an accordion named “Departed buses” and display available buses in an open accordion named “Available buses”.

2.      Information about input not clear

Currently, if a user wants to plan a trip, then he/she is required to provide some input in the fields "Leaving From" and "Going to" as seen in Figure 4. But information about what type of input is expected is not given on the website. It creates confusion as some users may think a city name is required whereas some users may think that region or province name is required in this field. 

Figure 4. Expected input not clear

Recommendation

As soon as a user clicks on the input field such as "Leaving from", a list of all the available location should become visible to the user in a drop down. Similarly, after the user selects the origin location, the "Going to" should only display the available routes from this location. 
Alternatively, instead of updating "Going to" field locations, show all the locations and when the user selects one of the locations where a direct route is not available, show them a route with connections in between them. 

3.      Boarding and Drop station addresses not present during booking

While planning a trip, it is very important to know the exact address of our drop/ boarding point. While booking a ticket, the only name of the city or some keywords are present under the “Schedule details” heading and the exact address of the boarding and drop location is not clear as seen in Figure 5. Problem is especially severe for a new user who is traveling from greyhound for the first time and has no information about its stops, therefore, making it very hard for them to plan the trip accordingly.

Figure 5. Exact Address not given during bus selection.

Recommendation

A pop-up or information box with the exact address of the station should be displayed when a user hovers over a specific stop. This is a standard convention and must be followed to make the user experience better.

4.      Baggage allowed information is not given during booking

The baggage allowed information is also not displayed to the user during the entire booking process, that means, from selecting a bus to payment confirmation of the tickets as seen in Figure 6. Importance of this information can be understood by the fact that a user may have to pay around 15 CAD extra per bag above the allowed limit.

  

Figure 6. No details of baggage allowed before payment.

Recommendation

The baggage allowed information should be displayed at multiple places to increase the trust of the customer on the website. First place can be within the “Schedule details” (refer Figure 6) and the second position can be a separate tab displaying baggage allowed and an option for the user to buy extra baggage space. In addition to that, baggage information should always be displayed at the time of payment confirmation or summary of purchase.

5.      Bad colour scheme used for links in the footer

The footer contains some important links such as “Courier Express” which navigates the user to sub website which helps in package shipment and tracking and “Station Locator” which helps users find nearest bus stations as seen in Figure 7. It is difficult to find the Station locater link due to its poor color scheme. This is important since a new user will always look for the nearest bus station before planning any trip.

 Figure 7. Bad color scheme used to show links in the footer.

Recommendation

Colour schemes play an important role in highlighting the importance of information and maintain the coherence with the design of the rest of the application. Therefore, colour scheme of this footer should be updated. A dark background as used on the rest of the website should be used. Alternatively, a dark colour for the font can be used too.

6.      Link to Greyhound Mexico website is partially clickable

It was found that link to Greyhound Mexico is only partially clickable as seen in Figure 9 and 10. Initially, it looks like a dead link as nothing happens when you click on the left half of the logo. This is an example of the bad design of clickable links and it makes a website less reliable.

 Figure 8. Clickable part of Greyhound Mexico icon.

Figure 9. Non-clickable part of Greyhound Mexico icon.

Recommendation

Correct the behavior by making entire flag/icon clickable. Also, there should be a clear separation between the two countries icons. Moreover, a small text “Greyhound across Globe” can be displayed in front of them.

Conclusions

Greyhound.com is the most used long-distance bus service of Canada and most of its users rely on the official website to book tickets for their next trip and yet, the official website has a lot of usability issues in the major functionalities such as searching for bus schedules, finding bus passes and checking stations have usability errors. Using the current website can be frustrating and may irritate the user because of the above-explained errors. The website requires a thorough change to correct the issues and gain customers trust. 

References

1. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/