I searched for a will this morning. The search itself was hard work, as it took numerous attempts using different length partial surname strings before I found the will I was looking for. Strange that using different length strings for the first characters of the name required produce completely different results, even though it is obvious that the search is matching on names longer than the number of characters entered. That part of the system is much more unwieldy than it used to be, and I wasn't offered any calendar page images to review at all during the search process.
But eventually, having found the record I was looking for and adding it to the basket, I was prompted to log in when attempting to pay. That worked seamlessly after the problems with trying to log in last week.
And the best part, totally unexpected, as soon as I had paid I was taken to the "My Orders" page, where there was already a download link highlighted against the record I had just paid for. I clicked on that, and a copy of the will and the grant of probate were both downloaded as two separate downloads, one for each document. If receiving copies of the documents ordered is going to be instant, or a matter of minutes, that is a great improvement on the previous system.
It seems that it is just the searching facilities that need improvement now, but it's getting there. Still seems very odd that you can only search for documents when logged out of your account though.
