TheTrainLine.com deserves praise as it will let you check if two single fares are cheaper than the equivalent return fare when you search for a journey. They almost always are and this fantastic feature saves you a packet for just about every return trip you make. (Such are the vagaries of the ATOC/National Rail fares system, but there we are.)
Anyway I wanted to remind myself what time my train goes tonight, so checked the booking/journey confirmation email. However it has a bit of a flaw in presenting a critical piece of information (which I have highlighted):
Dear MR PAUL BERRY,With your journey approaching we wanted to remind you of your travel details.
Collection Reference: 352CHH7W
Be Sure to bring this reference with you along with the payment card used to make the booking as both will be required to collect your ticket from the Self Service Ticket Machine.
From: SHEFFIELD
To: LONDON ST PANCRAS INTL
Date: 16/01/2009
Departure time: 0.76875
All your journey details are available in the my account section of our website.
If you need help with your booking, please visit our help section or call us on 0871 244 1545*
We hope you have a safe and enjoyable journey,
thetrainline team
*Please note that calls to this number cost 10p per minute plus network extras
Now this looks like a classic “time stored as decimal” formatting issue, as you sometimes see on raw spreadsheet data. The mystery is solved if you consider the time as a fraction of a day. 24 hrs * 0.76875 = 18.45 hrs or 18:27 in sexagesimal. Double-checking the times (since I’d already lost trust in the accuracy of the data) on National Rail Enquiries does indeed show a train departing Sheffield for London at 18:27 tonight.
I’m just thinking a bit further here of the person who goes through the trouble of doing the maths to work out the time but doesn’t do the final step so they get 18.45, which looks reasonable enough, and turn up for their quarter-to-seven train having missed it by 15 or so minutes! (Of course if the decimal hours come out at, say, 18.67 then that’s clearly not a time and in itself would be a prompt to complete the conversion but the above scenario still stands.)
What was Steve Krug‘s mantra again?
I wonder how many phone calls they get because of this? Could be a nice little earner! 😉
Hi Paul,
This is Tom from thetrainline.com, I came across your blog wanted to thank you for the nice words about our searching for single tickets feature.
I also wanted to send apologies to you and anyone else who experienced the formatting Issue that you came across. You are absolutely right in what happened with the time reverting to a decimal. We have since corrected the issue and fortunately it only impacted a small number of individuals.
That being said, we have started a big push to communicate with our customers and learn what other features they’d like us to add to our site that would improve either our service our customer support offerings. If you’ve got any ideas you’d like to share, feel free to post them as a response to this blog and I will pick them up.
Cheers,
Tom
P.S. I am a fan of Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think and this year we are looking to make the user experience much more simple
Tom,
Thanks for reading. To be honest I didn’t think it would reach much of an audience but I’m glad it has.
Something I forgot to add at the time of posting was it’s not that the bug was a big deal, but that anything that takes away the smallest bit of confidence for the end user is to be avoided.
I’m impressed that you’ve been trawling blogs to get very indirect customer feedback.
Regards,
Paul
Just trying to make the service better. Like I said in the last post, if you think of any ideas you’d like to share, just post them here and I will find them.
Cheers!