Carriers that Care is a service intended to be conducted largely in-person; however, processes such as sign-ups, check-in reporting by postal workers, and account viewing would best be conducted digitally - these are the interfaces that were designed to for this project.
I lead the identification of these necessary digital touchpoints, which lead the team and I to design a website, app, and dashboard to support postal workers and customers of Canada Post.
Key features
The initial touchpoint of Carriers that Care is intended to be a landing page, accessible from the Canada Post homepage, to clarify what this service is.
The landing page will come with an option for younger children of elderly loved ones to mail a brochure that contains information adjacent to what is included on the landing page.
Anticipating cases where families will be signing up their senior parents without warning, multiple callouts will included throughout the process.
Additionally, Canada Post will not begin delivery of the service until the company receives vocal consent from the recipient. The progress of this consent process will be visible through the dedicated Carriers that Care dashboard, which will be accessible through the web portal or through logging into Canada Post's website.
Once families have signed up, the bulk of the service will be conducted through neighbourhood postal workers, who will be assigned to conduct routine visits to the recipient's home.
As a result, the majority of this service would rely on a postal worker’s individual ability to be able to report on seniors. In order to alleviate this, and help customers feel more confident about the service, postal workers will be supported through mobile devices on the carrier.
Questionnaire to standardize reports
Routines are difficult to settle on, and we anticipate that a deeply personal service will require a lot of fine-tuning.
At any point in the service, customers will be able to:
- fine-tune the service to their comfort with the ability to adjust visitation plans
- collect more information about their assigned letter carrier
- submit feedback to the service.
The dashboard is an opportunity for Canada Post to connect Carriers That Care to other services in their ecosystem. One such proposal we had was the ability to have gifts hand-delivered by trusted posties through connecting our service to Canada Shops, an e-commerce store that was piloting during Fall of 2023.
What inspired this service?
The Canadian Union of Postal Workers have been advocating for a senior check-in service since 2016.
The 'Delivering Community Power' initiative, created by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW), are a set of proposals inspired by a sense of need for Canada Post to innovate - one of which include a proposal for a senior check-in service, which their earliest version dates back to 2016.
INSIGHT #2
There are limitations on what seniors and their families can communicate over long distances.
Further investigation also revealed to us that children would move out and start families on their own, and while they would successfully stay in contact, sometimes, there were events that senior parents would not think to communicate as they did not think of them as significant.
- Description of a recipient of senior check-in service in France. (Source: The New Yorker)
Following our proposal, my team and I kicked off our process with a 4-day design sprint, with the goal of identifying how we could best translate the existing check-in models of Japan Post and La Poste (France) to a Canadian context. At this point in our design process, all team members saw different ways Carriers that Care could fail, so I found that a sprint helped greatly pooling our thoughts to illustrate a shared understanding of what each of us thought were most actionable problem space in the service.
Notably, our golden path exercise (pictured above) helped the team and I brainstorm several 'HMW' statements to use as starting points for our design project. Statements we created ranged from logisitical ('HMW fit this into a postie's day-to-day?') to aspirational ('HMW ensure this service doesn't become box-checking?') - ultimately, we settled on a statement that helped us set the focus of the service towards establishing trust and connections between service and customer.
As a result of the golden path exercise, we created a landing page to communicate the values of the service and to establish trust amongst potential customers. We then presented these to 7 users for feedback.
Overview
4 Key areas of concern As identified through user interviews
Lack of trust in the carrier"I'd rather trust a family member or a neighbour to check in, rather than a postman."
"I'll do it myself""I feel like I'd go visit myself, since I don't have a terrible relationship with parents."
Feels impersonal"It just feels like I'd be asked, "Why won't my kids just call me instead?""
Stubbornness and rejecting care
ADJUSTED HMW STATEMENT, GIVEN THE RESULTS
By making “reporting on senior wellbeing” the primary purpose of the service, users trusted the service less because it put the mail carrier in a position of authority without the necessary training of medical professionals.
Secondary research sourced from the National Institute of Ageing (NIA) - particularly, their "Ageing in the Right Place" report, defines four fundamental pillars that are essential in enabling older adults to age in the most appropriate setting where their personal preferences, circumstances, and care needs are met.
This framework helped my team and I scope down our service focus to the fourth pillar, improving social connections to reduce loneliness and social isolation. I felt that this focus would be essential in keeping the trust of Carriers that Care, as I feel that postal workers would not have the capacity to reasonably support the other three pillars without fundamental changes to their jobs.
Given the research from the National Institute of Aging, we were able to frame the features of Carriers that Care around an investigation into how Canada Post may be able to use their current business values and brand image to reach the needs of a customer demographic that may have been overlooked by them.
With the rise of digital alternatives, revenue from letter delivery has been on the decline for the past 17 years, and in parcel delivery, Canada Post been losing market share to faster, cheaper competitors such as FedEx or UPS. Utilizing their reach to approximately 17 million addresses across the country (Canada Post, 2021), Carriers that Care would introduce a new stream of revenue to the business.