Catapulting consumer experiences forward

Design thinking
Product design

Over the course of 18 months, we helped British heritage brand, Post Office rebuild its digital and innovation capability from the ground up. 

Post Office money, travel and youth banking offerings

About the Post Office

An instantly recognisable British brand, the Post Office provides a host of services to millions of people every single day. But despite its long heritage, with the arrival of new challenger brands and sizable shifts in their customers’ digital expectations, the company understood that business-as-usual was no longer an option.

Consequently, the Post Office turned to &us for help as it embarked on an ambitious multi-year transformation designed to reinvent its services for a mobile-first world, and strengthen its commercial position. 

Empowering a new team of digital experts

One of the most important needs to address was the capacity and capabilities of the Post Office’s existing internal team. 

Originally a small team of four, &us enabled the company to build a thriving digital and innovation community of over 40 product practitioners, with the capabilities to unlock new value for customers through new digital products and services. 

“&us were instrumental in helping us realise our vision of setting up a new digital innovation capability within the Post Office. Their unquestionable expertise in product, and valuable appreciation for the complexities of large and somewhat bureaucratic organisations meant they were able to work with just the right amount of creativity and challenge to get us moving.”

Martin Thackray, Innovation Lead, Post Office
Post Office youth banking app
Post Office PoGo app on a billboard
From early concepts to a seamless new user experience for managing pre-paid cards.
Parental controls in the Post Office PoGo app
Design for the PoGo card welcome pack
Settings in the Post Office's PoGo app

Accelerating the innovation pipeline

As well as leading and building their internal digital and innovation team, the &us team were also closely involved in accelerating the ideation and testing of new product propositions, and the improvement of existing services.  This brought the &us team into close contact with other teams from across the organisation - from financial to identity services, travel money and postal product.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the key projects involved.

Project 1: Defining a new youth banking proposition

6 week discovery + design sprint

Keen to reach younger customers, the Post Office wanted to explore a financial services proposition for young people. Following positive feedback on an early stage concept for a new pre-paid card for parents and children, it was time to validate the idea further - mapping out the MVP user experience and exploring branding concepts.

Together with the financial services team, &us ran a six week discovery moving from initial ideation to an MVP that allowed the core experience to be validated with real customers, and established a new brand identity for the product.

Project 2: Modernising travel money

12 week discovery + design sprint

With a diminishing user base, &us next set about overhauling the Post Office’s existing travel money app. Together with an offshore development team, we redesigned the travel money app end-to-end, improving and modernising the app’s user experience.

Available on iOS and Android, the app offers users one convenient place to top up their travel money card, purchase travel insurance, book holiday essentials like hotels, parking and more. Within a year, the app had been downloaded over 800,000 times and with a 4.5/5 star average rating.

Improvements in the Post Office's Travel Money App

Project 3: Designing a digital identity service

12 week discovery + design sprint

Even today, businesses and customers often rely on physical documentation for proof of identity - an unreliable, inconvenient, and expensive process which can result in a poor customer experience.

Working with the identity services team, &us set about creating a transformative digital identity product - initially in the form of a mobile app that would only require users to verify their identity once. This would become the ‘front door’ to the thousands of Post Office services that require proof of identity for access.

Despite digital identity being a difficult concept for some of the Post Office’s users to grasp, we addressed concerns through extensive user interviews, and subsequently designed and built the first live, fully functioning MVP for the new service.

Post Office's digital identity service, Heidi
Demonstration of how the Post Office's digital identity service works
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Despite digital identity being a difficult concept for some of the Post Office’s users to grasp, we addressed concerns through extensive user interviews, and subsequently designed and built the first live, fully functioning MVP for the new service.
Illustration of a passport
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Project 4: Validating the use of AR technology

12 week discovery + design sprint

Working with the postal product team, &us explored possible uses cases for augmented reality to improve the customer experience. Together, we designed and built a proof-of-concept iOS app that was used to demo the proposition idea to senior stakeholders within the business.

“Within three months, [&us] had embedded product strategy and design expertise into the teams. teaching as they went, built out our internal teams, conceptualised a new-to-market youth proposition and released our first consumer app to market.”

Martin Thackray, Innovation Lead, Post Office

Key outcomes

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A new culture of making

By galvanising the teams around making products, we helped them become more action-based and helped new capabilities and learnings embed more deeply.

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More agile ways of working

By injecting the right level of agility and customer-led thinking at the right pace, we set up productivity and creativity to flourish long-term.

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Faster processes

By getting hands-on, we accelerated product discovery and delivery. We helped teams validate products and services faster so they could move the business forward.

 

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