In my semester breaks, I worked as a mailman. The work can be very rapid and stressful. To simplify daily tasks, the german mail agency introduced a digital tool. I managed to work with it. But as an interaction design student, I also noticed a lot of bad design decisions. Luckily we had a course about redesign the following semester. So I teamed up and tackled this tool.
The people ranged from students to long-established workers. Everybody had a different technical background. Through interviews, we noticed individual complaints and learned about the daily tasks.
After our visit, we dissected all the functions of the tool and defined three key problems.
unergonomic — Especially older workers get confused by the structure of UI elements.
inefficient — The control and navigation are too complex and time-consuming.
deterrent user experience — Low fault tolerance leads to uncertainty.
First, we sorted all functions, then filtered out the unnecessary and added new ideas. From this, we built up an information architecture. We adjusted the navigation to the workflow of a mailman, which can be divided into three parts.
In the morning the mailmen need to sort all mails and scan registered ones. If detectable, Optical Character Recognition leads to a more efficient registration. The manual input and flashlight function is offered to support this process.
Through the list view, the workers keep track of the open deliveries. The tool sends notifications when a delivery address is in a near location of it. If no receiver is reachable, the delivery status is easily changed and a notification letter can be printed out.
At the end of the day, the mailmen check and reschedule the leftover mails. The tool shows the worked hours and walked kilometers to personalize the daily experience.
