Digital times and evolving needs. New Zealand Post faced a change in approach as it adapted from a traditionally mail centred business into a parcel business. Bringing their website inline with best practise was essential in building trust with customers proving they could, literally, deliver on their service.
Improving simple usability issues and ensuring cohesion and credibility with visual design was the focus in bringing customers along for the journey. First up; a site audit.
It was identified that, overall, the New Zealand Post online experience lacked cohesion, and, the expression of the NZP brand could be more aligned with it’s foundational guidelines. Ensuring the experience of the brand on and offline were seamless, a new font with the addition of a style guide gave clear hierarchy rules to help shape and organise information.
Visually each page needed more space and less frills. The button design was simplified and made to feel cleaner and lighter. While deepening and opening up the nav and footer gave all the global moving parts greater accessibility. Blocks of colour, sometimes subtle and sometimes strong helped define a pace for users to delineate information. Content, written and visual, ensured the usability flows made sense and felt natural.
Individual pages; home/landing, key hub/tool pages, content pages as well as one-off campaign pages were crafted and became the basis for templates to roll out through the site. Each page had to meet the needs of a wide audience; Gifters (someone that uses NZ Post occasionally to send a gift or similar to a relative) and Ecommerce Users (frequent online shoppers) through to Traders, SME’s, Medium sized businesses and of course Large businesses.
Budget extended to stock imagery used in slices through the site while simple vector graphics for icons and infographics kept information from feeling too stale. While of course hard-working pages of forms, processes, transaction/account summaries, FAQ’s and instructions were kept clean and heavily relied on consistent styles.
