Role: Senior Product designer
Responsibilities: End to end UX/UI design; UX strategy and consultancy, user testing
OurPost is an extranet platform for workers at Australia Post. Currently, there’s a number of platforms for the workers to perform their day-to-day duties (e.g. timesheets and view leave balance). Sometimes workers have to access multiple platforms to get different things done.
The goal of this project is to gradually consolidate all other platforms into OurPost, so everything would be in one place that serves over 50,000 Australia Post workers across the nation.
To enable this, we needed an public facing area for workers to access news and corporate communication, and a personalised dashboard which serves them any personal information and web services that are available to them. The public facing part of the site is already built, plus some vision groundwork has been done on the dashboard UI.
In collaboration with an Experience Manager, my work was to design the end-to-end experience for the workers to access OurPost, amidst the myriad interconnections between existing platforms.
Understanding the why
In order to help me get a better understanding of what we would like to achieve out of this platform, I wanted to establish some design principles that we can adhere to. Also that would help us prioritise requirements for future iterations based on the “viability, feasibility and desirability” model.
Inspiration
We set out on an inspiration session to go through the user personas and extracted the needs, wants, pain-points from interviews conducted with our workers. Based on their occurrence, we identified four themes - Accessing personal information, Team connection, News and Accessibility.
Through these themes, we were able to determine our design principle as follows. These principles will guide us through our design process and create delightful experiences.
How might we provide convenient digital access to our users?
How might we help workers perform day-to-day duties?
How might we keep our workers informed.
How might we enable workers to connect with each other?
Brainstorming
Based on our design principles, we had a brainstorming on how we can answer these questions. Some of them are already included in the business requirements. The rest we would save for future improvements.
We know there’re two sides of OurPost. Now we have all the ideas in front of us, we would sort them based on what we know can be solved with content, and that can fall on the extranet side; the more personalised data would go into the dashboard. This has helped us to define the design requirements for both sides.
Technical limitations - 80+ tools across 40 segments
On the dashboard side, we have determined what we’d like to see there. We now have to work out the “how”. There are just over 80 third party tools and web services serving workers across over 40 segments. We need to make sure everyone gets what they want to do what they need to do, with ease.
Even though it was possible to pass data from some of these tools into the dashboard. It was inevitable that the user would still have to traverse between third party sites and the dashboard.
Some of the platforms are more customisable and developed internally at Australia Post, such as SAP. So the development team has engaged us to ensure that the user journey between SAP apps and OurPost is consistent where possible.
As for the others, it’s our work to determine how the user access them. We have developed multiple strategies that serves as guidance to minimise discontinuity of the experience and discomfort to our users due to the technical constraints. From our recommendations on serving third party tools from dashboard, how they would be arranged based on personalisation, search strategy on the discovery and access of tools, our due diligence on mobile responsiveness when we don’t have control over these apps, through to our vision on how to leverage this platform to its full potential into a dashboard that delivers a delightful experience.
Pivoting project scope - downgrading gracefully
Due to funding changes, the project had to be downscaled. We still wanted a graceful experience that our users can find what they want easily.
Working together with the development team and information architects, we helped define an MVP with the stakeholders based on our updated funding.
User testing
We then tested the MVP prototype with a group of workers across segments and digital literacy, from delivery workers to corporate managers. The aim was to validate that with the MVP functionality, users can still find the information they need easily.
The testing was overall successful. Many commented on the clear and simple design of the homepage and dashboard screens., the ability to easily access their pay and leave, especially at home and on their own personal devices. And the ability to easily access role-specific apps. They also commented positively on the personalisation and localisation of weather.
Overall the experience was well received. One worker notably commented "With an organisation as big as Aus Post, this has the power to pull people together.”
Outcome
Unfortunately, due to further pivoting on the scope, the project has been put on a halt.
We compiled a project summary report detailing what has been done and our vision. So in case of project reinitiation a starting point is already established to develop further.