Hermes Technologies

I often travel from my lovely hometown Galway to my work town Dublin on the GoBus non-stop speed wi-fi bus. I love the service but so do a lot of other people so I book ahead to ensure a seat.

GoBus Ireland Defaults to a booking of zero tickets. Handy.

When you use their website to book a ticket it asks you your starting point, destination and time. At this point I usually click next, only to get the form spat back at me telling me “zero is an invalid number of passengers”.

Now I don’t mean to offend the adorable web designer who designed this piece of code but COME ON!! How many people do you think go to the trouble of filling out that form to book zero tickets? Let me take a wild guess: none?

Whats more there is a second failing with this form design: users must first select which “route” they wish to take, before then choosing a starting point and ending point. Considering that there are only two journeys available with GoBus (Galway-Dublin and Dublin to Galway), having to choose your route THEN your starting and ending point is tautologous, as one is implied by the other.

Forms should be designed to cater for the typical user in as efficient a way as possible. Your typical visitor to GoBus is there to book a single ticket for themselves. Intelligent web design would mean defaulting to a passenger number of “one” so that these typical customers can book without needing to fill in an extra tautological.

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