Freelance Product Designer
(UX & Strategy)
The Post Office
Fix, stabilise and uplift
Role: Post Office, 2016-2018 (3 year contract). Interim UX Manager Digital Team. Led multiple UX projects and initiatives to help improve the team's capability, capacity and quality. Recruited and recommended resource requirements to scale up projects using fit for purpose design agencies.
Key skills: Resilience, design thinking, user research, information architecture, Interaction design, stakeholder management, coaching team, new tools, processes and methodologies (lean UX and agile).
My initiatives made a measurable positive impact on sales (10-20%)
UX uplift for digital product sales
1. The mission
I created an internal programme called the UX Uplift. I was multi purpose in its objectives to:
Demonstrate the positive impact design thinking has on digital sales
Coach and skill up the Product Owners within the digital team
Create UX resources and guides for an internal playbook
Prove lean and agile methods work (moving away from wagile)
Scale up using fit for purpose design agencies
Design mobile first
Fix first then continuously improve
2. The approach
I wanted to simplify the approach and show the end-to-end path to delivery. Well received with the organisation including the CEO.
Work samples
Profiles
I create these profiles to test with based on existing research. With over 100 plus products sold online the profiles needed to be evolved and widened. Customer awareness of the financial and travel products and services sold by the Post Office was low. Was a loved brand with confusion over the Post Office and Royal Mail.
Mobile first approach. Information hierarchy matching audience needs
A/B testing new pages
This version demonstrated 14% increase CTR compared to the old version
Just do and learn from experiments
3. Outcomes
Delivered an uplift in sales and a new pre-sales website
Started the process of a new Design System using an external agency
Pushed for increase spends, resource and expertise across digital projects
Initiated the change in Brand and used data to prove successful outcomes
Called out issues with suppliers and partners to unblock progress in digital transformation
4. Conclusion
The Post Office was one of my most challenging assignments. Trying to push change in a publicly owned organisation was full of resistance. However, the mantra 'just do and ask for forgiveness later' paid off. Fail fast and experiment as much as possible was the path to succeed.