UK Railcard Dark UX Experience 16-17 Saver

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 09:22:38 +0100

UK Railcard Dark UX Experience 16-17 Saver

Last night I was asked by my wife to buy a railcard for my son. He’ll be touring the universities he might want to choose over the next couple of weeks, and my wife knew that there was a railcard that we could buy for him to save money on the fare. She told me to buy the 16-17 card.

There is a website for railcards here: https://www.railcard.co.uk/

When I went through the Tesco clubcard process to buy the railcard, I was registered and logged in before I got offered a choice, so what choice did I get?

This one:

What did I do? I chose the 16-25 railcard. That’s the one right?

Wrong. Look at the options on the front page of the site, which I’d not been sent to.

Spot the differences? There are 2 extra railcards hidden from logged in users.

The question is why would the selection of railcards not be the same on both pages? Are they run by different bodies? No, both are run by National Rail. Do they have different processes? No both have the same FAQ’s, more or less, and use the same railcard app.

Could it be because the 16-17 railcard offers a reduction of 50% on rail fares, whereas the 16-25 card only offers 33%?

Why even have a 16-25 card? Why not call it 18-25? Why would anyone buy a 16-25 card for a 16 year old?

There is a different website to make it even harder to find: https://www.16-17saver.co.uk/

There is a concept known as “Dark UX” where the website choices exist but not on the common path that people would take. So the company can claim “oh yes it’s on the website” while knowing full well that they’ve gone to some effort to specifically exclude certain options on the default user experience journey.

It will be interesting to see what response I get to my complaint.

Dark-Ux on R A Fletcher's Blog

UK Railcard Dark UX Experience 16-17 Saver

UK Railcard Dark UX Experience 16-17 Saver