University of Washington

Amtrak User Interface

Usability Report
HCDE 301

Ruby Davis
10-10-2018
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Introduction
Amtrak is a passenger railroad service that serves thousands of customers daily
(Amtrak, 2018). In order to purchase tickets to ride Amtrak trains, the most common
method is to use Amtrak’s website. This report examines the ability of this website’s
interface to best meet its users’ needs. Specifically, this report examines the following
research question: to what extent is the Amtrak web interface effective in efficiently
allowing all users to purchase the correct Amtrak ticket?

This report will begin by providing background of the Amtrak service and website. Then,
the report’s methods and evaluation criteria—efficiency, accessibility, and error
prevention—will be defined and explained. Following this, the results of this evaluation
on Amtrak’s website will be presented with discussion of how these results influence the
site’s effectiveness in meeting its users’ needs. Finally, the report will conclude with a
summary, parting thoughts. and recommendations for improvements to the site.

Background
This report examines the Amtrak ticket purchasing website (2018). Amtrak serves
approximately 500 locations in 46 states. In addition to selling Amtrak tickets, the
Amtrak website is a crucial trip planning tool for thousands of travelers. The service is
used both by frequent daily commuters, who may value efficiency and shortcuts to
speed up their repeated ticket booking experiences, as well as infrequent travelers, who
are the most susceptible to error and most vulnerable to lost business due to poor
interfacing. Ticket purchasing occurs in three steps: selecting passengers, selecting
train tickets, and checkout.

Amtrak’s mission statement declares that they aim to “deliver intercity transportation
that helps move people, the economy and the nation forward.” In addition, Amtrak’s
goal is to become “Americans’ preferred mode of travel” via “efficient and effective
business” and “modernizing the customer experience”. This report considers these goals
when developing its criteria for evaluating the Amtrak website’s user interface.

Method
To evaluate this interface, three different criteria were used: efficiency, accessibility,
and error prevention. These criteria were chosen for their relevance to Amtrak’s users
and correlation with Amtrak’s mission statement.

Efficiency
For this report, efficiency characterizes systems that can be quickly and effectively
navigated by both new and returning users. This allows users to minimize their time
spent using interfaces. For Amtrak’s online ticket purchasing site, the user’s goal is to
purchase a train ticket. Most users are not interested in spending more time than
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necessary on Amtrak’s site. Therefore, efficiency is an important metric in evaluating

the success of this site in meeting its user’s goals.

In order to evaluate the system’s efficiency, several sub-criteria were used. The New
York State User Experience Toolkit highlights several key factors in promoting efficiency
in user experience design. Among those relevant to Amtrak’s interface are flexible
defaults, the use of ambient information, and a lack of clutter. In addition, Jakob
Nielsen’s Ten Usability Heuristics (1995) describes efficiency as including “accelerators”
which speed up use for expert users, but are invisible to new users. All four of these
sub-criteria—flexible defaults, ambient information, lack of clutter, and accelerators—
were used to evaluate Amtrak’s user interface.

Accessibility
This report defines accessibility as usability by people with diverse abilities. People with
disabilities make up a significant portion of the Amtrak website’s users, and
accommodating their needs is key to creating an inclusive and profitable system.

To evaluate accessibility, this report considers the following sub-criteria: strong color
contrast, view customization, screen reader optimization, adequate contrast between
essential information and surroundings, minimized required mouse use, and adequate
mouse target areas. Each of these sub-criteria are drawn from common practices and
values in accessible design. Ruby Zheng’s article on Universal Design from the
Interaction Design Foundation (2018) details several of these sub-criteria by describing
equitable use, flexibility, simplicity, intuitiveness, and tolerance for error. The World
Wide Web Consortium (2018) also explains many of these elements for consideration,
additionally highlighting alt text and keyboard input.

Error Prevention
Error prevention will be defined in this report as taking steps to ensure that a system
avoids incorrect actions and mistakes, especially those which are difficult to reverse.
Error prevention is key to a good customer experience, especially when mistakes can
mean loss of money and transportation for users.

To evaluate Amtrak’s error prevention, this report examines the site’s prevention of
accidental destructive actions, confusing flow, and bad input. These sub-criteria were
drawn from New York State’s Use Experience Toolkit (2018). In addition, systems
should offer confirmation and warning for actions that may often be performed by
mistake. Forgiveness for and correction of incorrect actions is also beneficial to
preventing more severe errors. These sub-criteria were drawn from Anton Nikolov’s
article “Design principle: Error & Forgiveness” (2017) from UX Planet.
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Results & Discussion

Overall, Amtrak has created a site that does allow efficient and error-free ticket
bookings for most of its users, users who select complicated or atypical options will take
significantly longer to purchase their tickets and may run into many issues. In addition,
the accessibility of the site’s flexible digital design does accommodate many kinds of
people with disabilities, but the process for purchasing train tickets for people with
disabilities is error-prone. The process overall is more difficult for people with disabilities
and atypical ticket requirements.

Efficiency
For experienced users, the Amtrak ticket purchasing website meets most efficiency
standards. Although there was no clear option for saving a reoccurring trip for
reordering, the process for purchasing simple trips was quick. The default options
throughout most of the ticket purchasing process were consistent with the most
common user path: a single one-way adult ticket paid for in US dollars. In addition,
there is a variety of information conveyed ambiently through icons on the train ticket
selection page, including icons that indicate wheelchair accessibility, free Wi-Fi, luggage
space, and available bike storage. These icons are visible in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Symbols that encode important information about features available for
different seats.
However, these “accelerators” are not hidden from new users, and the information they
encode is sometimes rendered inaccessible. Some of these shortcuts and ambient
information may be confusing to new users and may slow down the ticket purchasing
process. For example, certain symbols in the figure above, such as the carry-on luggage
symbol and the checked luggage symbol, might not be immediately recognizable to new
users, and no alternate encoding of that information exists on the page. In addition,
during the initial selection of passenger type, certain options shown in Figure 2 are
abbreviated in ways that could confuse new users. “NARP” is an uncommon acronym
that stands for “National Association of Railroad Passengers”, and those unfamiliar with
the term may be unsure how to proceed through this section of the form.
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Figure 2: Drop-down menu of “discount types” for adult passengers.

Overall, Amtrak’s user interface has many elements that are conducive to efficiency, but
they are integrated into the system as seamlessly as they should be to accommodate
new users.

Accessibility
Amtrak’s “accessibility view” control panel (Figure 3) provides many customizable visual
design options that successfully optimize the page for users with low vision, reading
difficulties, or screen readers. The amount of whitespace around important headings
and features is increased, and the background and text colors may be changed to
yellow on black and black on cream. In addition, font scaling is available for all text on
the site. All links may be turned into large clickable buttons, and buttons and links may
be navigated via the “tab” key instead of the mouse.

Figure 3: Assistive options in the accessibility view to increase the accessibility of the
page’s visual design.

However, there are still improvements that can be made to the site’s accessibility. The
accessibility view is hidden in the bottom section of the site and is only available to
English speakers. Many of the accessibility view’s customizability may be helpful both to
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people with and without disabilities, so making the features easier to find or integrating
them into the default system could improve the user experience for all users.

In addition, there are several complications that hinder or prevent users with disabilities
from purchasing accessible train tickets. In order for a user to indicate that they have a
disability, they must open the “Discounts” drop-down menu (Figure 2) and select that
they are a “Passenger with Disability”. Nesting this important selection under
“Discounts” is both confusing and problematic. A user may be a member of the National
Association of Railway Passengers, an active military member, and a passenger with a
disability. The issue becomes even more significant when the system requires
Companion tickets to be purchased only in conjunction with tickets for passengers with
disabilities, but does not consider tickets for children with disabilities to satisfy this
requirement. Although the visual design of the system is highly effective, the user path
for passengers with disabilities is in need of reevaluation to ensure a smoother activity
flow.

Error Prevention
Amtrak’s ticket purchasing website does prevent its users from submitting invalid data,
but issues with its task flow and potential loss of data may cause errors that lead to
much longer completion times and user frustration.

Amtrak’s system does not allow the user to submit data that would cause errors further
along in the ticket purchasing process. For example, if a user attempts to select a single
child passenger without an accompanying adult, the site creates an error message that
informs the user of the problem and what they must do to correct it. This error
message is visible in Figure 4. Although the phrasing of the error message is dubious,
the message is still clear. Feedback messages like this help guide the user through the
correct use of the system and promotes error forgiveness.

Figure 4: Error notifications during traveler type selection to warn users that all children
must be accompanied by adults.

That said, some of these errors might be avoidable in the first place with a less
confusing flow with fewer ambiguous elements. In particular, the “Add Passengers”
window contains multiple “vestigial” elements that either do not serve a purpose or are
redundant, as seen below in Figure 5. When selecting the number of travelers, users
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may select an “infant” ticket. Upon selection, however, the site simply says that infants
are “free with a paying adult” and does not add a ticket to the inventory. Similarly,
senior tickets may be selected either by adding a senior ticket directly or by adding an
adult with the senior discount selection.

Figure 5: Inoperative infant selection option on the “Add Traveler” dialogue.

There are other elements that may lead to errors in ticket purchasing as well. Further
along the user flow, the “Add to Cart” button next to tickets takes the user directly to
add-ons and check out without providing the user with the chance to continue adding
other tickets to their cart. This could result in hasty or incorrect purchases. Finally, the
site does not save information when users go back to previous pages in their browsers.
This lack of error forgiveness forces users to spend extra time filling out forms multiple
times if they need to correct previously entered information.

While Amtrak’s interface does prevent certain kinds of errors, its interface does not
discourage certain kinds of errors before they occur, resulting in an interface that is
reactionary rather than preventative. The interface is still usable, but has many areas
for improvement.

Conclusion
This report set out to examine the extent to which all users were able to efficiently and
accurately purchase tickets for Amtrak trains. The background information of this report
informed the methods and criteria chosen for evaluation. The results of this evaluation
were presented with discussion of how these results influence the site’s ability to
provide efficient and correct ticket purchasing for all users. This has provided the
necessary information to provide answers to the initial research question and conclude
the report.

This report has determined that although Amtrak’s web interface has allowed efficient
correct ticket purchasing for many of its frequent users, less frequent users and users
with disabilities may have more difficulty quickly and accurately purchasing tickets. To
truly achieve its mission statement, Amtrak must reevaluate and refine its ticket
purchasing system to solve preventable issues for its users.
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Recommendations
The Amtrak website has several areas for improvement. The user paths for users with
less typical ticket purchasing may result in frequent errors due either to confusing
feature locations, unexpected results to actions, or the blocking of some user paths
altogether. In particular, the “Add Traveler and Discounts” page (as seen in figures 4
and 5) could be improved and reorganized to eliminate redundant and inoperative
features. Designers may reconsider which ticket options are considered “discounts”, and
which are not.

In addition, designers may consider improving the discoverability of Amtrak’s robust

accessibility features and customization. Opening the site’s accessibility customization
options to all users could improve the overall usability of the site.

References
Amtrak Tickets, Schedules and Train Routes. (2018). Retrieved October 8, 2018, from
http://www.amtrak.com/
Lawton Henry, S., & McGee, L. (Eds.). (2018, June). Accessibility. Retrieved October 8,
2018, from https://www.w3.org/standards/webdesign/accessibility
Nielsen, J. (1995, January 1). 10 Heuristics for User Interface Design:. Retrieved October
10, 2018, from https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/
Nikolov, A. (2017, May 27). Design principle: Error & Forgiveness. Retrieved October 8,
2018, from https://uxplanet.org/design-principle-error-forgiveness-1495f7471113
User Experience Toolkit. (2018). Retrieved October 8, 2018, from
https://www.labor.ny.gov/ux/
Zheng, R. (2018, October 1). Learn to Create Accessible Websites with the Principles of
Universal Design. Retrieved October 8, 2018, from https://www.interaction-
design.org/literature/article/learn-to-create-accessible-websites-with-the-principles-of-
universal-design