Overview
Background
Global enterprises rely heavily on behind-the-scenes operations, such as mail centers, which process thousands of incoming and outgoing packages daily to keep businesses running smoothly. These mailrooms, often tucked away in basements or back offices, are critical to ensuring operational efficiency in large organizations.
Problem
Mail center employees handle a variety of tasks using numerous disparate tools. This complexity becomes especially challenging for employees managing multiple responsibilities, leading to inefficiencies and frustration.
Meanwhile, supervisors and operations heads face a different pain point: the need to monitor mail center performance to allocate budgets and resources effectively. The quarterly activity of collecting and analyzing data is time-consuming and cumbersome, adding to their workload and delaying decision-making.
Solution
A single, unified platform designed to cater to all roles within the mail center, providing:
1. Shipping, Receiving, and Last-Mile Delivery functionalities.
2. Integration with smart lockers for secure, streamlined package management.
3. Comprehensive analytics tools to help supervisors and operations heads access performance insights quickly and efficiently.
This platform simplifies workflows, consolidates tools, and provides data-driven insights to enhance productivity and decision-making
My Role
As the User Experience Architect, I was responsible for:
- Crafting the Design Strategy to align user needs with business goals.
- Leading User Research to uncover pain points and prioritize features.
- Managing Stakeholder Relationships to ensure alignment across teams and secure buy-in for key decisions.
Team
Two Interaction Designers: Focused on designing workflows and interfaces.
Associate UX Researcher: Supported research efforts and usability testing.
A unified solution - Dynamic and persona driven
Design Process
A big part of our research included ethnographic studies and contextual inquiries conducted at mail centers of government agencies, enterprises and universities. A few clients we visited are
Key Insights
Diverse Stakeholders:
- Unlike typical office environments, large-scale mailroom operations involved multiple stakeholders, including supervisors, sending and receiving clerks, non-mailroom users, admins, and regional mail managers. Each persona had distinct roles and responsibilities.
Specialized Roles:
- Some personas were highly specialized, performing specific tasks such as driving trucks to deliver packages from the central mail center to recipients in various buildings.
- Others, such as supervisors, monitored activities, assisted with tasks as needed, and reported on overall mailroom performance.
Varied Reporting Practices
- Reporting frequency varied across enterprises: Some generated monthly or quarterly reports, while others preferred weekly or biweekly reports to track mailroom performance.
Complex Onboarding
- Onboarding new staff was a common pain point across enterprises. Employees needed to learn multiple tools, which made the process tedious and challenging.
- Some enterprises relied on written documents, while others conducted training sessions.
- Regardless of the method, all stakeholders found the process overwhelming and time-intensive.
Desire for Simplification
- Across personas, there was a shared longing for a streamlined and focused experience—a single platform that avoided unnecessary complexity and provided essential tools without overwhelming users.
User Profiles
After conducting primary research and observing multiple mailroom environments, we identified five distinct user profiles: Supervisor, Receiving Clerk, Sending Clerk, Locker Administrator, and Professional Services Representative. Each persona has unique objectives and requires access to tailored functionalities on the mailroom platform.
“I need detailed reports with insight into our mailroom processes with key measures of how everyone is applying those processes."
Goals:
- Monitor overall mailroom performance.
- Access and analyze detailed reports with key operational metrics.
- Use insights to optimize workflows and resource allocation.
“I need to receive packages from the loading dock and sort them into routes for delivery and monitor volumes”
Goals:
- Receive and process incoming packages.
- Sort packages for delivery routes.
- Monitor incoming package volumes and delivery schedules.
“I need to send packages and ship requests. I also need to manage history and transaction reports.”
Goals:
- Process and send outgoing packages.
- Manage shipping requests and labels.
- Access transaction history and generate shipping reports.
“I need to reserve lockers for package placement and optimize utilization of lockers for all locations.”
Goals:
- Reserve and assign lockers for package storage.
- Ensure optimal utilization of lockers across various locations.
- Address locker-related issues and track usage analytics.
Since users wanted a focused experience without being overwhelmed by unnecessary tasks, we needed the ability to customize an experience based on the client persona. The best way to do this effectively, was to provide Pitney Bowes Professional Services representative with the ability to set up everything and Turn features ON/OFF based on a clients business needs
“I need to onboard the client and provide the right setup so users can see a tailored experience that meets their needs.
Like every other vendor on the market, Pitney Bowes also provides solutions for the mail center but each of our solution handles only one specific piece of the mail center operations. We had to find a way to bring our own products together on a single platform in order to provide a one stop shop solution. But before we did that, we first identified the core needs of different personas and categorized them into buckets as we now knew the mail center needs. We finally started to pull together the complete list of products we offered in the market to understand which of these products we could bring onto a single platform
Understanding our various product offerings and putting them together with the key insights derived from our ethnographic studies helped us understand that in order to provide a certain user with only what they need and avoid unnecessary confusion we had to heavily personalize the experience based on the personas and in order to do that we would need a dedicated console that turns ON only what a user needs. These findings helped us frame our design strategy and early architecture conversations.
Once we identified our design strategy, we wanted to quickly validate our thought process and the core workflows we identified as user needs, so we went down to Fidelity Investments in Ohio and brought a few mailroom clerks and supervisors together to do a quick design thinking session with a couple of hand picked Human Centered Methods. This exercise validated our thought track and informed us that we are in the right direction.
We repeated this validation process with a few other clients before we moved forward.
Core Design Principle driving platform architecture - No Visual Clutter
The mail center is a chaotic environment with a lot of hustle bustle where they need to get things to its destination on time and this means the platform had to do exactly what the user needed. Nothing more, nothing less. So we decided to abide by a single design principle - No visual clutter.
Only if the user needs it he sees it.
Design
We provide four separate solutions to support mail center operations today - SendSuite Tracking Online for Receiving, SendPro Online for Shipping, Intelligent Lockers and SendPro Analytics for generating reports and dashboards with customer data. Here is a snapshot of these four products.
Challenges with using existing products for providing a new solution
Lack of consistency with Design System versions on products
The four products were on different versions of our Design System and the latest version which was going to release within two months after the design work on this product starts. This version had changed its visual language completely. This meant two things.
- . We couldn't reuse most of the elements in the current products.
- If we use the current version of the Design System, this product will not be on the latest version by the time of its release leading to more work a few months down the lane as it is now outdated.
Providing way finding that abides with core design principle
Figuring out a navigation system for products that are already feature rich was going to pose a unique challenge especially when we want to abide by our design principle i.e. no visual clutter. This meant we had to stick to two rules that would guide our designs.
- We had to optimize and personalize our navigation so users only saw what they needed.
- To support the previous statement, we needed an all new place where product administrators / professional services team can turn features ON/OFF based on roles
Overcoming Challenges
#1 - Lack of consistency with design system versions
To address lack of consistency with design system versions, we decided to reuse the latest design system that was in the works and ready to release in the next two months. We worked closely with the Design System team to align with the new brand guidance, visual language and components.
We went with the classic color theme and classic gradient to keep our options open around white labelling the platform in the future. We also decided to showcase our product pages using a tinted background to help focus on content and important pieces of information as needed.
#2 - Way finding that abides with core design principle
To optimize navigation, we went with a primary and secondary navigation bar structure where primary navigation labels lead users to different capabilities on the platform while secondary navigation labels lead users to the specific pages within the platform. On this platform these specific pages will be configured based on a users role in order to personalize their experience.
We recognized four user profiles through research - Supervisor, Receiving Clerk, Sending Clerk and Locker Administrator
Primary and Secondary navigation structure for a Sending Clerk with access to Admin tools.
Constantly Learning
Even though this product had a spotlight on it and a lot of executive pressure for a quick turn over, we made sure it was being validated every step of the way. With each feature we developed we were getting feedback and continuously making changes to the product to better suit our enterprise customers needs (and our business goals of course).
