Canada Post: Carriers that Care

Three questions for the project team

What was the particular challenge of the project from a UX point of view?
The challenges that stood out to us the most were issues of invasiveness and the perceived qualifications of mail carriers. Due to poor digital literacy among seniors, the service was designed to allow families to sign up to increase its accessibility. This comes with the issue of the potential for users to be signed up without consent\; a vulnerability that we also noticed with existing precedents. The service also needed to be delivered at a scope that mail carriers who have no medical training can be trained and trusted by the public to perform the specified tasks. This meant a lot on our work of researching and determining the proper scope for the project within the five week time constraint of the course.

What was your personal highlight in the development process? Was there an aha!-moment, was there a low point?
The personal highlight in our process came after our initial user tests and interviews. Users acknowledged the service’s value but expressed reservations about using it or trusting it themselves as we focused primarily on promoting preventative health and better management. Despite receiving criticisms, our research results confirmed that our premise had promise, however, we needed to go back to research to adjust our approach moving forward. This led to our turning point, pivoting on improving social connections to alleviate loneliness and social isolation; the service would be more feasible for postal workers to carry out and align more closely with Canada Post’s business goals of connecting Canadian citizens.

Where do you see yourself and the project in the next five years?
As a team, we don’t necessarily see this project as the perfect solution for Canada Post, but it opens the conversation to rethinking the role of postal services in a digital era, and ways to provide sustainable care for seniors and better serve rural areas in Canada. However, it did open our eyes as to how UX design can be implemented and benefit several diverse spaces and take shape in non-digital formats.

In 5 years, we as individual designers see ourselves as having grown from this experience and what it taught us about the importance of empathy and research as a foundation for user-centric design. We hope to work on more projects in the future that will make meaningful differences and challenge us to grow as designers and people.