Shipping Re-Imagined

The existing mobile app was a frustrating experience for users who encountered a clunky design that felt more like a website stuffed into an app. Key tasks were slow, navigation was confusing and the app lacked consistency in its design and functionality making it hard for users to understand or trust the experience.

More users (108MM MAU) visited UPS.com, many on mobile web, while approximately 4.6 MAU use the native mobile app. The goal is move more users to the native app by giving them an appealing interface on their devices, and allow users to ship packages and make delivery changes on their app instead of calling support. The native can provide a better experience by retaining their tracking history, remembering their preferences and their contacts and integrating with notification and location services and contacts on the device.

The mobile app makes it easier to make delivery changes like giving your driver instructions, divert the package to a neighbor or to a UPS location or change the delivery date. The new app will connect physical and digital touch-points.

The new app would be a customer-first design and can use the device's camera to capture 1Z numbers and QR codes to facilitate tracking packages and sharing address information with associates at The UPS Store. It can also use the user's device to locate The UPS Store locations, drop boxes and UPS Access Points to help users drop off or pick up shipments and get directions.

I did UX design, research, prototyping, and visual design for this project. I came late to the project, primarily designed by AKQA, and worked on the issues we needed to develop before launch. I worked with the team on the design of various parts of the project, including redelivering to my address, scheduling a pickup, saved address treatments, notification management, shipping notifications, location-aware notifications, the onboarding flow, disclaimers, promo codes, in-store mode calendar, international domestic shipping, international payment types, the Xamarin sunset message, accessibility issues and many more. Later, senior leadership asked me to make a prototype to address some problems uncovered during a usability test.

Creating high-fidelity mockups of mobile UI and high-fidelity prototypes in Figma. Advising UPS on how designers should organize Figma files in the future. Contributing to the UPS Mobile Design System.

When the app launched it had a dedicated tab for user profile information and a hamburger menu that contains a mixture of profile information and navigation menu items. Some menu options were repeated between the hamburger menu and the profile tab, creating redundancies and possible user confusion. The goal of the follow up study Francis ran was to understand how users categorize the menu items to inform a new information architecture.

Card sorting is a tool for understanding user's mental models and how people categorize information. Card sorting is an activity where participants are asked to sort 'cards' into different categories based on what makes sense to them. The output of a card sort shows how concepts and information relate to each other and informs decisions about how to structure the content.

The card sort study was run with 100 participants, 40 of whom were small business people (customers and prospective) and 60 were consumers (customers and prospective).

The prototype shows how the new user menu and the 'more' menu operate.

UPS app user menu prototype