New mtvan booking page

I’ve just finished putting the final touches on a new mtvan booking page.

It replaces a rather old and clunky version that I did when I was first starting out building dynamic websites in PHP. So what have I improved…

Minimised Required Fields

The old page required the user to provide all sorts of information: Customer details, booking reference number, short description, collection address, collection postcode, delivery address and delivery postcode! This obviously presents the user with a bit of a hurdle to overcome. The new page just asks for a collection postcode and a delivery postcode as that’s all we need to create a booking. The main aim of this was to reduce the arduous form filling that some of our busy vendors don’t have the time for.

Minimised Visual Weight

There’s a lot of different data that can be useful to collect about a courier work booking. Unfortunately even if completion is optional, a big long form can be rather daunting to the user. The new form has a default ‘quick’ layout, which can be expanded to a detailed view if required. The state the page is left in is recorded in our user table for next time they visit the page.

Improved Page Submission Speed

Previously when the booking form was submitted, we went away and did all sorts of clever things geocoding and looking up time zones etc. Except as the server had to make various calls to multiple services, this was not so clever. Although it was bearable, it did add a good few seconds to the submission time. The new page minimises the required calls, and the ones it does make it performs in a separate PHP fork, so as not to affect the user experience. The form submission is now instant.

Reassuring Animations and Feedback

The new page takes advantage of jQuery to slide open various options when the user requests something or selects an option that is going to require a little more data. Previously we would just show/hide via addresses, but these are now animated. Not only is it more cute to use, I think it makes it far more obvious what just happened when an option was selected.

There are loads more little improvements here and there (too many to list here), but if you’re in the transport and logistics industry and have excess work that needs covering, you can give it a try over at mtvan now – it’s free.