Comparison: redBus.in Vs TNSTC.in
Comparing a website of a private company vs a governmental one is always fun. Shows how much difference can exist between these two worlds. If the websites are so different, wonder how the actual service the government provides will be.
redBus.in sports a clean and simple interface. Auto filling/suggestions kick in. Once you fill the 'To' field, a calendar for the next two months rolls in automatically. Nice touch.
TNSTC has the mandatory Chief Minister's picture. And lots of other informative links, including 'Browser Settings'.
And one has to search for the ticket booking link/button. It's not as bad as Chennai BSNL's website though, which takes the prize for being the most chaotic, with all kinds of animated gifs, blinking/rolling text etc. I have visited it every month for the last 7 years, yet find it difficult every time I go there to pay my landline/broadband bill.
Sorry for the digression. Coming back to TNSTC, signing up proved to be somewhat difficult. And they seem to have a penchant for mobiles. Many times, they defaulted to the m.tnstc.in mobile interface, even when I was browsing from my 17" laptop. Not sure why.
And they have a weird drop down option called 'Journey Time Between'.
What does 'BEFORE 12 PM' mean? It makes sense only when the other two choices are read. They could have very well said 12AM - 12PM. And why split a day into unequal intervals of 12 hrs - 8 hrs - 4 hrs? They can very well get rid of this option too. How difficult would it be to just show all the available buses on a particular day? Like redBus does.
redBus has neat sorting options on each of the columns too. I can search by fare, by rating, by travels, by Dep/Arr times etc. TNSTC's case would be much easier as they have lesser options to deal with.
There were more quirks (as expected) with the TNSTC website. I put in the date, the weird 'journey time between' option, the From/To places, and hit 'Search Services'. Only to be greeted with this error message.
The mistake I did - not to choose the 'Class of Service'. If I'm not choosing the class of service, why not show all the bus options? More over, clicking the error message's OK button meant that the From and To fields became empty and I'd to fill them up again!
The seat choosing screen was kind of ok.
But it is still ages behind the light, AJAXy feel of a page like redBus.in's.
The TNSTC site is 'powered by' (sic) Radiant Info Systems. A look at their website shows why it is no wonder TNSTC's site is so poorly designed.
Here's hoping Radiant and TNSTC get to see how some of the world's leading eCom websites are designed, and they get to improve their present design/UI, seeing/learning from others.
