Deep user research, innovative technical design

In collaboration with the fantastic team at the Post Office we understood that efficiency was an important heuristic for this project. Armed with low-fidelity prototypes the team and I tested the app in a branch used for trialing new products and services. From this we learned that each branch would have multiple users, each of whom would need to be identified quickly and easily each time a transaction took place. In addition the data input would need to change based on the delivery service purchased, the return type or the original carrier used if a return. Because of the ongoing work to build an API layer between new products and the Post Office’s Horizon system, we also could not know what fields would need to be presented, or what data would be displayed for each transaction now or in the future.

Technically the app would need to be developed natively for android to provide the quick transitions and interactions with the API layer that the project demanded. Switching between users in branch would be achieved using a simple PIN that would be entered for each transaction, and the input fields would be rendered dynamically based on the API responses.