The German postal system has a complex catalogue of postage, making it difficult for people to navigate which product to buy for their letters and parcels.
My team sought to create a tool to help users quickly navigate the complexities of German postage requirements, allowing them to choose the right product from the portfolio based on a number of criteria, including destination, weight, size, express services and more.
After conducting a thorough audit of all available products from the company’s portfolio and identifying the most commonly purchased products and surfaces, we created user personas and mock journeys to identify pain points.
By setting out with the goal of maximising the number of users we would be impact with our minimal viable product, we were able to prioritise testing in a cost-effective way by creating a fully responsive web app.
We started by conducting qualitative interviews, gathering valuable insights on our users and their various needs while testing our hypotheses. Providing users with different scenarios and giving them tasks to complete, we started testing with paper prototypes, refining at each stage of the testing process. Along the way, we were able to recognise, for example, that few users were able to accurately estimate the weight of a letter but could provide information on the number of pages they wanted to send.
After multiple rounds of low-fidelity testing, we creating high-fidelity prototypes with inVision that helped users easily choose the correct postage.
Based on user feedback, the new system was perceived as being substantially easier to use than the former. Roughly 90% of users were able to find the correct postage (up from 30% of users of the old system). We also found that it was easier to upsell services to users with the new system, with 35% of users adding additional services during the selection process.
