The Amtrak Website Has a "New Look."

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Devil's Advocate said:
PerRock said:
Yes, the old site had a mobile version, but it regularly did not work & had very limited information. It also was a completely different website. In the new "mobile" site, you have all the information the "main" site has, but displayed for a smaller touch screen. As maintenance goes, they only have to change something on the "main" website & because the "main" website is the "mobile" website that change is reflected there.
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I don't think there is much opposition to replacing the previous mobile site. The old mobile site was far too limited and the new site will be an objective improvement there. I also agree that having both sites using similar designs and templates is an obvious benefit. However, inadvertently trashing important desktop website functionality as part of the upgrade process has made it more difficult for me to plan and purchase a trip with a currently unusable account credit. Better to deploy to the mobile side first, where the affected volume and severity of impact is likely to be substantially reduced, and then replace the primary site later after any migration problems are resolved and everything is functioning properly.
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The point of a responsive site is that you do not have a "mobile" site and a "main" site. It's all literally the same site. Because of this, you cannot (ok there are ways...) realistically roll out only a mobile upgrade and keep the main, it's all one thing.

If they wanted to change the navigation bar from "Destinations" to, say, "Stations" they only need to do it one place (since it's all the same file) and the change is reflected on the other "versions" of the website.

ps. After writing my fun fact below... A better way to think of it as "formats" not "sites."


Fun fact, if your screen is narrower than 1000px then you'll get the Tablet formatting, narrower than 690px, you get the Phone formatting; anything wider than 1000px, and it the standard formatting.

peter
 
For the trains having Business Class there now is no way to book BC except calling. Is not even shown of trains section.

My IE-10 will not let me touch screen expand or compact. Have to use control - or + to adjust screen so not to have to go horizontal.
 
My point is more about isolation of issues rather than division of experiences. Amtrak could maintain the goal of having both mobile and desktop sites becoming a unified destination, but start out by only serving the new site to devices specifically requesting the mobile version. Meanwhile the primary desktop site would remain fully functional during the initial roll out to maintain full functionality until it was replaced after most of the bugs and other complications had been worked out. This assumes they'd planned the middleware changes to support both sites simultaneously. In that situation mobile users would benefit with improved functionality in exchange for helping to troubleshoot the initial result before it became the one and only site for everyone.
 
west point said:
For the trains having Business Class there now is no way to book BC except calling. Is not even shown of trains section.
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For corridor trains, it is right there.
For LD trains (I checked the Crescent), it's there in the premium column, you just have to use the arrows. It's misnamed as a roomette, but it's there:

Screen Shot 2017-10-17 at 5.08.04 PM.png

Screen Shot 2017-10-17 at 5.07.52 PM.png

west point said:
My IE-10 will not let me touch screen expand or compact. Have to use control - or + to adjust screen so not to have to go horizontal.
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IE 11 works fine on my work laptop. Maybe stop using an unsupported browser?
 
It works just fine on the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome and Safari (on my iPhone), except the scaling and formatting still needs a little work for the phone form. That is why they have not announced it for devices yet I suppose.
 
So, for giggles, I googled "Principles of millennial website design", and here are the top 10 results:

Five design principles to attract the Millennial traveller - tnooz

The Seven Principles of Millennial-Minded Design for Customer ...
The Design Principles of Simplicity - Speckyboy
How to design UX for millennials | Webdesigner Depot
The In-Depth Guide to Branding for Millennials - Tim B Design
Designing for Young Adults (Ages 18-25) | Nielsen Norman Group
Top Web Design Trends To Watch In 2017 - Forbes
8 Effective Web Design Principles You Should Know - ConversionXL
Applying the principles of psychology to design - Marketing Week
Crafting UX/UI for the Millennial Audience - UX Motel
It boils down to keep the design simple and uncluttered, thinking is done on the server side, and execute competently.

The new Amtrak site gets two out of three.

PaulM said:
Could you point me to something like "Modern and Clean Web Design for Dummies" or a text book for a course entitled "Computer Science 101: Principles of millennial website design"?
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Devil's Advocate said:
However, inadvertently trashing important desktop website functionality as part of the upgrade process has made it more difficult for me to plan and purchase a trip with a currently unusable account credit.
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I have long thought that a primary goal in sales would be to make it easy for the customer to decide he or she wants to give the company money. I am repeatedly surprised by uninformative (at best) websites that want me to click here or add to cart without providing enough description of the product for me to make an informed choice. (The most recent example is a hotel that offered several gradations of rooms without a description of what changes.)

On the plus side, I do have more money and fewer possessions than I would if web sites were more informative.
 
So how are people printing their e-Tickets these days for reservations made using the new web site?

That would appear to be a fundamentally essential feature for using e-Tickets for presentation to the train crew?
 
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The site is still giving out the wrong information about bicycles. The "Trainside Checked Bicycle Service" drop down on the "Bring your bike onboard the train" page under the "On board" tab under the "Experience" tab only lists corridor trains. Nothing about long distance trains. A reasonably intelligent person should infer from the text that the corridor train info means rolling up unboxed bikes, but it isn't explicitly stated.

If you book an LD train, there's a button for bicycles, but all the hover-over text says is "This train accommodates bikes. If space is available, select them in this reservation on the Add-Ons page". Based on the information that's on the Bring your bike page, the logical conclusion would be that you're booking a space for a boxed bike.

The PDF schedules only make it more confusing. The Coast Starlight PDF schedule is still pre-roll up service (January 2016) and was never revised. The California Zephyr PDF is also from January 2016, but it was revised with updated bike language. The Empire Builder was updated this year and also has updated bike language. But it's as vague as the roll over text:

Trainside checked bicycle service offered between staffed locations handling checked baggage. Customers will check in with the station agent, get a claim check/baggage tag for their bike, and hand up to a crew member inside the baggage car. Visit Amtrak.com/bikes for more information.
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Again, based on the new bike page, it's easy to conclude they're referring to boxed bikes.

Regardless of whatever design wizardry they're attempting, the ancient law of computing still applies: garbage in, garbage out.
 
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I'm having trouble finding information about services in or around the stations. It seems like information regarding the availability of red caps, taxis and connecting transit have been eliminated. It still has the map but parking information is as vague as ever.
 
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There are 100+ posts above that have pointed out problems with the revised Amtrak website.
How many of you have contacted Amtrak directly and informed them of the mistakes, shortcomings, unworkability and omissions of the new site. I don't see any posts about a reply on a complaint made to Amtrak.
 
RRRick said:
There are 100+ posts above that have pointed out problems with the revised Amtrak website.

How many of you have contacted Amtrak directly and informed them of the mistakes, shortcomings, unworkability and omissions of the new site. I don't see any posts about a reply on a complaint made to Amtrak.
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On Sunday when it first rolled out, I did contact Amtrak via their FB page (a PM) (since the link to "contact us" was broken, too). They responded back and we went back an forth a few times. As I recall, the person I was "talking" to was happy that I contacted them about the issue I was reporting. Eventually my issue was fixed (just double checked it).
 
RRRick said:
There are 100+ posts above that have pointed out problems with the revised Amtrak website.

How many of you have contacted Amtrak directly and informed them of the mistakes, shortcomings, unworkability and omissions of the new site. I don't see any posts about a reply on a complaint made to Amtrak.
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Prior to this fiasco of a new website, I had another issue with the iOS mobile app. The regular Amtrak agent transferred me to Internet support, so there's actually a possibility that you could be connected to someone that could carry the concerns forward to, dare i think it, problem resolution.
I'm retired from IT after 30 plus years and this frankly has to be one of the worst software upgrades and migrations that I've seen. But I I'll be good and keep biting my tongue so I don't say what I've really wanted to say for the past couple of weeks.

Sent from my iPhone using Amtrak Forum
 
Just wrestled through my first booking on the new site. It wouldn't let me change a booking I had already started from one way to round trip, then my credit card disappeared from my account. It was there, I clicked to book, the response came back saying that the card had expired (it hadn't and it was showing correctly). When I went back to reenter it, my card info had disappeared. I tried logging out and logging back in and it was still gone. Had to reenter it.

On the plus side, I did get a PDF confirmation via email very quickly.

ChuckL - +1 :)
 
People should definitely give specific complaints to Amtrak. I haven't actually made a booking since the new site was rolled out, so I haven't felt that I could give a proper bug report.
 
I made several reservations on the new website two days ago and immediately received email confirmations for all of them. All my reservations show up correctly under "My Trips" on the website as well as under "Upcoming Trips" on the app, so it looks like they were at least able to resolve some of the reported issues.
 

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