Railroads are a good thing. They led to the invention of standard time zones. They’ve revolutionized industries and economies. They are the most dramatic setting in which to say goodbye to a loved one.

That being said, everything is wrong with Irish Rail.

Full disclosure: I’m American. And I don’t want to be one of those immigrants who complain about their adoptive country all the time. I know what that’s like to listen to (like I said, I’m American). But I think my assessment of Irish rail is more than a complaint. It’s a fact — like ‘the square root of 64 is 8′, or ‘a noun is a person place or thing’.

Here at iQ, we find ourselves talking about Irish transportation a lot — if it’s not Dublin bus, it’s the LUAS that’s got us up in arms. But for the most part, our complaints have focused on one aspect of the transport in question (in the above cases, Dublin Bus’s website and the LUAS’s carriage design).

But travel is a 360 degree experience. We could remake Irish rail’s website, but it wouldn’t fix the organisation’s deeper problems. Before you have a business case for your website, you should have a handle on your business.

So what follows is what I think is wrong with Irish Rail, from booking tickets to leaving the station, and some ways the company could fix it (which, as their customers, we should demand). Please forgive the occasional hints of annoyance — 40 minutes of every day of my life is spent on Irish rail. That’s 243 hours a year.

Problem 1: booking your tickets online

Irish rail recently made an improvement to their online booking system. They removed the reservations option from the homepage, so now all you search for is the timetable.

But my compliments end there.

How it works now

Let’s say I wanted to book a ticket from Heuston Station Dublin to Ballina in Mayo. The first bit is easy enough. You find the two stations in the drop down menu and click Search. But then you get this (click to view full size):

The time and date are clear enough, and even the fact that there is a train change is clear. But there are issues:

1. The price is a click away (click to view full size).

Why not just list them on the page? If there’s a different price for each journey (which there is), it’s hard to make a quick comparison, since you’d have to memorise each price pop up, instead of simply seeing it listed in front of you.

2. The difference in seats shouldn’t be a factor at this point in the booking process. It just confuses things. What’s the difference between ‘Standard seats’ and ‘Ticket only’ anyway? To add to the confusion, ‘Standard’ and ‘Ticket only’ are the only choices available for this journey, so why is ‘Premier’ even listed here? (Click to view full size).

And speaking of ‘Premier,’ here’s the pop up when you click on the P. Irish rail are kings of the passive voice. (Click to view full size).

“A selection of trains will be shown in response to your previous query.” That’s the first sentence I see when I click on the P to see what that means. Thanks for nothing, Irish Rail.

3. The disclaimer (Click to view full size).

That blurb at the bottom may as well say, “Hey, all this information you see here? Probably a lie.” Doesn’t give much confidence when you’re planning a journey.

Solutions

• Focus on a task-based online booking system
• Provide better content.

Find out what your users need when they are booking, and provide them with only that. Extra content gets in the way. And don’t write your content like a lawyer is hovering over you.

Problem number 2: Waiting (and waiting) for the train

Trains can be late. This is a fact of life. There are things like “system failures” and “operational difficulties” and other such indecipherable announcements. Lately, the train I take (the Kildare line) has been 10 to 30 minutes late almost every day of the week. And my route isn’t the only one with punctuality problems.

The sign of a good, healthy company is the same as the cornerstone of evolution: adaptability. When trains break down, when signals fail, healthy companies will figure out different way to serve their customers.

They’ll reroute another train or turn an express train into a local service for people stranded at a station. Irish Rail has an advanced communication system — they should be able adapt to problems so that the customers aren’t the biggest losers.

Solution

I’m sure there’s an engineering answer to lessen the incredibly high rate of train and system failures. But more importantly, adaptability can deal with the fallout when problems do happen. It’s 2009 — technically we should have flying cars by now.

Problem number 3: Boarding the train

Recently, I took a train down to Cork from Dublin on a Saturday. The train was very crowded and the queue was unruly. Heuston now has automatic ticketing machines, for which they gave themselves much back patting (I’ll get to that later), but there were Irish Rail workers trying to control the crowd of people. There was a mix up between those with reserved seats, and those without, which meant that some ticketholders weren’t able to board the train.

Solution

There are two issues here:

1. Either have all reserved seating or all open seating. Both can’t work. Case in point: Irish rail oversold that train and most people didn’t understand what was going on.
2. Clear signage. Clearly mark the outside of each train car, so passengers know where to go with the seat number on their ticket. Provide clear signs where people should wait for a train if they are not allowed to board right away. Instead, Irish rail managed to produce mass chaos. And this is Dublin, not Delhi.

Problem number four: Arriving at your destination

The new turnstile issues.

Picture it: it’s early April, 2008, a cold spring day. You arrive in Heuston station at morning rush hour. You’re walking along the track after exiting the train with at least a hundred other people. Suddenly everyone stops. You’re crowded against everyone and you can’t move forward. You look ahead and see that one Irish rail worker is standing in the doorway checking everyone’s ticket one by one. That’s their system. It adds at least five minutes to your commute time. And probably takes a year off your life.

Fast forward to the end of April, 2008. it’s still a cold spring day. But now Heuston station has unveiled their automatic ticket checking machines. They are lined across all the platforms like a little robot army. This is it, you think. Finally exiting the train at Heuston won’t be such a nightmare. You put your ticket through the machine. It spit it back out at you. And the person next to you. A crowd forms.

What has happened since then, is that an Irish rail worker stands at one turnstile holding it open, and the crowd filters through there. So it’s exactly like the old system, but far more expensive.

Solution

• Make sure the ticket machines work. Seems basic enough.
• After testing, coordinate the machines. Make sure enough are in operation for passenger entering and exiting and that they are placed near the correct platforms at the correct times.

The common denominator: The customer

User centred design for websites places the user in the driver’s seat. If we re-built Irish Rail’s site, we’d use personas, user testing and user surveys to build the site with the user in mind. And that’s what needs to happen with the rest of Irish Rail, all the way through the experience. The customer who foots the bill should be the star of the show. Not lost in a crowd of angry commuters.