National Express East Coast - online Numberwang

The National Express East Coast website has received a bit of stick recently from us usability folks. It has some nice features in my opinion. Not least the feature that allows you to play Numberwang when trying to make a change to your ticket.

The form for amending a journey asks for a ticket number. This seems like a pretty natural thing to ask for. But like me, a lot of people pick their tickets up from a FastTicket machine just before they travel. So we don't have a ticket number. This is where your Numberwang skills come in to play.

You can't get past the form without entering a ticket number and you can't change your ticket over the phone. So what do you do? I tried to put my booking reference number into the box, but it was too long. I also tried to leave it blank. No such luck.

When I phoned the nice people (and they are very nice) at National Express East Coast I was told to "simply" enter 12345 into the form field for the ticket number.

Now if I'd been a little better at Numberwang, I'd have had little problem. I blame myself.