Canada Post has, for the last 17 years, been seeing a decline in their profits as letter delivery becomes replaced by the internet, while faster, cheaper competitors such as UPS and FedEx have been growing their shares in the parcel delivery market.
Carriers that Care is an expansion on an idea proposed by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers as one way to expand Canada Post’s offerings. Through the service, we hope to build connections and sense of community in seniors’ lives, while reassuring family that their loves ones are safe and doing well.
I lead the identification of the necessary digital touch points, which lead the team and I to design a website, app, and dashboard to support postal workers and customers of Canada Post.
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Samaila Newaz
Tristan Turisno
Hugo Duran
UX/UI Design
UX Research
Content Design
Canadian seniors desire to age in their own homes, while their children live far away.
Children would move out and start families on their own, and while they would stay in contact, sometimes there are events that senior parents would not think to communicate as they did not think of them as significant.
- National Institute on Aging (2020)
- Telus Health (2020)
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.
Countries like Japan and France have have already established successful check-in programs.
In Canada, letter carriers are one of the most trusted professionals.
Postal services are in a unique position to leverage their door-to-door network, so they can meet the emerging needs of seniors living independently.
So why not Canada Post have a check-in service too?
How might we utilize the existing infrastructure of Canada Post to support socially isolated seniors?
Carriers that Care is a service that comes in 3 steps. Each point involves different stakeholders and various touchpoints.
Was recently widowed.
Canadians can sign up for the service for themselves, or for their loved ones.
Our user, Selena, would navigate through the landing page to get information about the Carriers that Care. After ensuring that she has gotten consent from Rachel that she will be participating in this service, she can enter basic information about Rachel such as visitation schedules and family member contacts.
After sign-ups, a postie will start coming by for a visit - to have a friendly conversation, and to make sure everything’s going well.
POSTAL WORKER APP
In order to alleviate the service being reliant on a postal worker’s individual ability to be able to report on seniors, postal workers will be supported through an app on their mobile devices.
A mobile intervention would reduce cognitive overhead on posties that are conducting check-ins by giving structure to the reporting process. In turn, this would ensure trust in the service by allowing posties to be confident and transparent, reminding them that 'conversations' is the core of the service.
At the end of each visit, a postie will send a short report ensuring that Canadians can stay updated about the social and physical well-being of their loved ones.
A bonus: providing future opportunities for Canada Post
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.