We were asked to solve a big and ever growing problem for the Postal Service: help them provide better customer service to their elite clients. Our team took a complicated conglomerate of tools and simplified into a single platform, reducing time and effort to track down the most important packages.

This was a fascinating information architecture and design problem. Prioritization and hierarchy of information was absolutely important as we were combining a huge amount of data from 12 tools into this one singular tool. Through intense iteration and bi-weekly reviews and feedback from our stakeholders, we were able to correctly prioritize content on both the macro and micro level.

For the beginning of our delivery phase, we took the simple prototype and put it in front of real customer service reps. We walked them through the prototype, asking questions about the prototype, their process, and their approach. We asked them about terminology and vernacular to make sure this tool felt like it was built for them. When we looked at their working space, we knew to bring USPS specific surprise and delight moments across the product.

User's said they felt highly competitive with their teammates, particularly when others take on too many requests to pad their numbers. So we looked at ways to instill a sense of teamwork as well as individual performance. We used low-impact gamification and illustrations to reinforce these ideas.

We also explored how to coach user's through their process without appearing and feeling bothersome, but helpful instead.

Our team was thorough in looking for areas to improve efficiency. We provided shortcuts for repetitive tasks where possible, integrated machine learning that empowers our users with helpful problem solving tips, and always provided our users with the ability to leave feedback for the problem they were solving as well as feedback for the tool.

This was my first experience at leading a team, as I shared co-lead duties with the senior visual designer. Together we worked tightly with the full team and instituted a much more collaborative process than what the studio was known for. Personally, I lead the interaction design and research on the team and instituted block framing as a way to collaborate and interate quickly.

Our project was a success after delivery. Unfortunately, I was not part of the team that continued testing the software, but our tool was reported to be a hit with users. Our software helped move users from 42 minutes down to 26 minutes. It was said that we saved days in time for our user's and allowed them to offer answers while on the phone with customers versus the previous way of responses coming in days later. When news got out about what our tool could do, USPS signed up for a second phase that allowed users to access part of the tool depending on their roll type. This was also the basis for third iteration of the tool and multiple other requests for work from USPS's system.