Indian Railway Catering & Tourism Corporation [IRCTC] — Poor UI and unnecessary toll gates for Security

Newly released IRCTC website seems more like ribbon-cutting formality than actually providing better customer experience.

Management Feedback
I understand that IRCTC wants to be as close as all other sites like MMT, Yatra operate but Software engineers and esp Architects involved in approving such designs must understand that IRCTC is targeting completely different demographic and another level of scalability. So even though govt must have pumped alot of money to bring talent from MMT, Yatra etc but goal and customers are completely different.

Anyhow, i really wish someone with Authority in big chain of IRCTC software + Business should read this to understand their customers.

Technical Feedback
Below are my suggestions and please consider them if you see fit
1. Default page navigation to ticket booking should be flashed/mentioned in every page. It difficult to navigate back to ticket booking once you deviate to other pages in site.
2. Booking form is highly mismanaged with no color code to find out mandatory fields and there are a lot of them. So someone booking their ticket need to submit the page multiple times just to trigger validation.
3. Page does not fit into one screen of 1920x1080 resolution. It can easily be done with tiling and some compact UI designing. But we copied MMT, Yatra so we missed the point. If you still want same look, at least have a compact option on top so that user does have to scroll multiple time to find the field he/she missed.
4. after mandatory field validation, cursor just goes to start of page instead of first missing field.
5. Keyboard tab navigation of booking form is terrible. I cannot even start on it.
6. I think instead of reducing the session time o[censored]ser by getting all details in one go and submitting, new website has made it so terrible that IRCTC servers to manage more sessions at one time. Please reduce the session time for managing he scalability and modernization cannot be at the cost of performance.
7. i saw my network and thread traces, when IRCTC session was spawned there was alot o[censored]nwanted traffic (ads, detail) was also transferred at the same time. Atleast make that stop. This is like suicide at the cost of commercialization. Its tax payers website, commercialize it at your own time.

Regards,
Kshitij Gupta
Concerned citizen and tax payer since 2005.