PostNL – BlueHair – Design & Innovation

#UX #DesignSprints #DesignSystem #WebPlatform

I've worked as part of different Agile teams at PostNL, a mail, parcel and e-commerce corporation in the Netherlands. My task as a UX designer has been to ensure that the complex products offered to consumers and business users are as easy to understand and use as possible.

1. UNDERSTAND: Discover the business opportunity, the audience, the competition, the value proposition, and define metrics of success. 2. DIVERGE: Explore, develop and iterate creative ways of solving the problem, regardless of feasibility. 3. CONVERGE: Identify ideas that fit the next product cycle and explore them in further detail through storyboarding. 4. PROTOTYPE: Design and prepare prototype(s) that can be tested with real life users. 5. TEST: Conduct user testing with 5 or 6 people from the product's primary target audience. Ask good questions.

Design Sprints

In order to kickstart projects and generate mould-breaking ideas, I’ve been part of Design Sprints within PostNL. These are 5-day workshops in which goals are clearly defined and ideas validated by analysing the business strategy, using multidisciplinary collaboration, rapid prototyping, and user testing.

Facilitation

Part of my role as UX specialist is to discuss product strategy with the business leads and to help product owners identify the goals of our customers (which are then translated into ‘user stories’). This is done during weekly meetings with stakeholders and by having problem-framing and ideation workshops.

Analysis & Concept development

User stories are then used to generate concrete ideas on how to help our customers achieve their goals. I make these ideas tangible in the form of flowcharts, hand sketches, digital wireframes or high-quality screen mockups. Visualizing our ideas in such a way helps to establish a dialogue between stakeholders (developers, product owner, copywriters, business, and marketing leads) and enables us to make better-informed decisions.

Testing

We validate ideas by creating interactive prototypes that allow us to perform tests with users, either during formal usability tests or by performing guerrilla testing within the office. Our validations help us create better products, and allows us to identify problems with the designs before a single line of code has been written, which reduces costs for the team.

Specifications & Design system

Communication within the team is crucial. We need to make sure that developers know exactly what they need to build, and we need a shared knowledge of how particular UX challenges are solved so that we can identify similar patterns and be able to deliver a consistent experience to our end users. To this end, I help create and maintain PostNL’s Design System, which includes UX specifications and commonly used patterns and components.

Delivering quality work

I’m responsible for all design work within the Agile teams I belong to. This includes ensuring the quality of the work delivered by aligning with the head of the UX department, mentoring and guiding junior designers, and coordinating with our visual designers so that they can create pixel-perfect mockups.

Successful impact

The success of our approach is reflected in the positive feedback we receive, but more importantly, in the impact our work has on the business. As an example, 4 months after we redesigned the Relocation Service, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) for the product increased from -37.5 to -2.1, customer satisfaction increased from 37% to 62% and the service had a revenue increase of 25%.