Megabus

=Megabus - []=

Megabus lacks brick and mortar stations where passengers can wait for buses or purchase tickets. A functional website is necessary for Megabus to attract customers and generate revenue.

Primary users of megabus (MB) would be there to schedule a trip. MB facilitates this by making route search/buy immediately available to the user as soon as the page loads. When selecting

**1 Strive for consistency. **

The website is very consistent. All pages follow the same color theme, blue and yellow. The buses themselves are also this color, so there is that familiarity when you go from the online experience to the one in real life. Spelling, punctuation, and capitalization are all consistent across sections. All headers for subsections (Search and Buy, Features, Service Advisories, Network Map) are capitalized with references to those sections capitalized as well.

While there are no shortcut keys I know of, the site does know what country you are in and directs you to the appropriate localization of megabus (US, UK, Canada).
 * 2 Enable frequent users to use shortcuts. **


 * 3 Offer informative feedback. **

Links and image links provide the expected feedback by changing the cursor from default to a pointer (the hand with the index finger extended on Windows), a universally accepted notification that what your mouse is over can be clicked and will do something on the page. When the user selects the city of departure, the site has to populate arrival cities that start from that departure point. Instead of just hanging the page, a notification informs the user that the site is still working.


 * 4 Design dialog to yield closure. **

Links on the page have dialogue instructing the user what to do, such as "click here", "read more", and more specifically "Click here for Service Advisories".


 * 5 Offer simple error handling. **

When planning a trip, the megabus forces (in a good way) the user to enter information linearly. First the city of departure, arrival, then outbound date, return date. This linear progression makes it impossible for the user to skip or miss a field, erroneously press the search button, wait for a page to load, only to be greeted with an error message indicating he/she forgot a field. However a problem I noticed is if you change the start location after filling everything else in, it changes the end location to a default field, since this new start location will have different end locations. A user might not be aware of that and think the same end location as before has carried over. You're still allowed to search even though the end location isn't an actual location, its an option titled "Select". The page proceeds as normal, bringing up the loading notification but then it kicks back to the page, with a hard to notice error message on the page "Attention Invalid search data", and no further information indicating which field specifically caused the error.


 * 6 Permit easy reversal of actions. **

While planning a trip, the user must proceed linearly as described above, however they may go back and change the location of departure or arrival without affecting the outbound or return date, and vice versa. However this can lead to the bug described above.


 * 7 Support internal locus of control. **

The user initiated an action and the page has the appropriate response (load a page, display a working notification).


 * 8 Reduce short-term memory load. **

The homepage features a set of rotating banners with a manual control. This way more information can be presented in a limited space - reducing scrolling and sensory overload, and the user is free to pause or return to any interesting banners he/she wanted to view.