Project - Sumo

Context

2020 and 2021 were significant milestone for La Poste (the National French Post Company). After receiving complains from delivery stations regarding the lack of coherence and efficiency of the intranet, La Poste decided to develop a new management tool.

I was part of an ambitious project which aims to assist and support Operations Manager in their daily activities in one of the oldest French company.

Problem

La Poste’s Operations Managers use more than 15 apps everyday. Through these apps, they have access to team's results, distribution rate, incidence rate, claims etc...

Obviously, when user is searching data among 15 different apps, it leads to a waste of time and a lack of productivity. How to resolve this and give back time to managers? How to let managers spend more time to manage humains instead of searching for a data in tones of apps?

My Scope

Led and organised online workshops and focus-group with final users.
Based on user's needs and IT's contraints, I prioritised features for a MVP.
Produced all design specs, design recommendations and final UI mockups for both desktop and mobile version.

Design Process

Design Process inspired by the Double Diamant. British Council, 2005.

Approach

Since we build for improving people’s work, I proceeded a user-centric process: from the prioritisation of their needs to the final solution.

The design process has been made through a MVP approach, hence we prioritised and de-prioritised features.

What I learnt

Facilitate Online Workshop: Because of Covid-19, I had to conduct all workshops online. I learnt a lot about this remote exercice and adjusted my existing skills. The biggest challenges was to retain participants’ attention. I used brevity, games, breaks, encouraged feedbacks…
Design For Everyone: This product has been made for a wide range of users. La Poste’s operatives are in average 55 y.o. During all the process I needed to keep in mind that I am designing for people that are the same age as my parents.

DISCOVERY AND INSIGHTS

Hand in hand with in-house designers I gathered key insights from previous observations sessions. These key insights were the breadcrumb of our user-centric process.

HIGH WORKLOAD: Workload is high and information may come from anywhere and anyone.
TOO MANY APPS: Users are lost using several app at the same time.
CONSTANTLY MOVING: Managers are constantly moving from their desk to meet or help someone in the sorting center.
CONSTANTLY DISTURBED: People come and leave the managers’ office frequently during the day.

Photo credit: Nicolas Fèvre

Collect User’s needs

In order to develop and design a tool which will give support and assist their everyday tasks, we needed to understand and be aware of managers’ schedule, task after task. Thanks to in-house ergonomic engineer, we had access to the to this data.

The list of Needs

The biggest problem I faced during this project was to design a tool with a wide range of information and indicators. Even though, all the Operation Managers need the same core of information, they also have some speciality. Some managers work at the morning, so they focus on organisation mailing and packages distribution, whereas other managers are working at the afternoon, so they may need to care of mailing distribution rate and claims.

Hence, we get rid of the out-of-the-scope activities that SUMO wasn’t able to improve efficiency. Then, we split all activities into 8 categories: Organisation, HR, QA, Claims, Distribution, Reshipping and Delivery.

Thanks to a new online workshop, we co-built a rank of the most important and urgent activities done by the managers.

Prioritise the most urgent and important features

Because of COVID-19, we couldn't organise onsite workshop. That's why we used online tool such as Miro. Miro is a powerful tool for collaborating with your team. It fits many design step, from brainstorming to ideation process.

Operation managers face a dilemma everyday, by talking with them we realised that an activity can be urgent and/or important.

An urgent activity is essentiel for a good continuity of the delivery flow.
An important activity has a special interest for the company’s management.

Mental Model and Information Architecture

In order to build the mental model, we used previous’ workshops as insights. Here is the result:

Different indicators are needed at each step of the day.
These indicators should respect a Hierarchical Structures. From an indicator, user can drill further down into the structure to find narrower.

We know that operatives have a working day split into 3 periods:

Each period of time required different indicators and data. So we decided to build the information architecture regarding these periods. At that stage, we already have the main infrastructure of the app:

CO-CREATION WITH USERS

Online Workshops Organisation

Using Miro, participants moved components in order to create the dashboard they wanted. For each interface which may raise an issue, we collected users' ideas, discussed about them and made a final decision.

PROTOTYPING

Feedbacks from users

For example, we redesigned this view 2 times after proceeded user tests.

Even though COVID-19 was spreading in August 2020, we had the autorization to make onsite user tests.

Result and conclusion

More than 120 mockups has been made for project (mobile & desktop). We did our best to use and respect a full design process. I am proud of the work we did in a short time and with these sanitary conditions.

FINALE DESIGNS

The following designs shipped publicly to everyone across the world.

D-1 Results

D1 Shipping

Preparation Delivering

Tracking Production

Delivery Estimation

Tracking Live

Tracking of one delivery

Settings

THE (NO)LAUNCH

At the time I am writing those lines, the project hasn’t been launched yet. It has been deprioritized since the Covid 19 seriously impact La Poste quality service. On the other hand, La Poste also needs to deal with the significant reductions in letter volumes and the constant increase in parcel shipping volumes. It leads to a brutal and deep jobs reorganisation and the launch of new services and products.

Management Tool