The question millions of people ask every day. I spent three months finding out why Royal Mail’s app couldn’t answer it properly — and redesigning the journeys that were supposed to.
Royal Mail’s consumer app had a problem that showed up in every review: customers couldn’t complete basic tasks. Track a parcel. Book a redelivery. Send something. Pay a fee. Each journey was either broken, confusing, or redirected somewhere unexpected.
The ratings told the story. Frustrated users left feedback about dead-end flows, unclear error messages, and journeys that bounced them between the native app and a responsive website with no warning. The app wasn’t serving its users — it was generating support calls.
Royal Mail needed someone to assess the entire consumer digital estate, identify what was broken, and design a path forward. That was my brief for three months.
The reality behind the bad reviews was structural. Royal Mail’s digital experience wasn’t one product — it was a patchwork of platforms built by siloed teams that had never aligned on a shared customer experience strategy.
Strategy decks don’t change minds. Watching real users struggle does. I ran moderated usability testing across the key consumer journeys — five participants per flow, tested in multiple cadences as designs evolved.
The testing sessions were structured around the core tasks: sending a parcel, tracking a delivery, booking a redelivery, paying a surcharge. I recruited participants across different demographics and levels of digital confidence — because Royal Mail’s customer base includes everyone from students to pensioners.
What the testing revealed went beyond usability issues. It exposed fundamental mismatches between what the business thought customers needed and what they actually struggled with:
I mapped and redesigned nine consumer journeys end-to-end: send a parcel, track a delivery, book a redelivery, pay a fee, set up a redirect, hold mail, apply for a PO box, buy items, and manage an account. For each, I documented the current state with pain points, designed the target experience, and identified which improvements could be made within the existing platform vs. which required architectural change.
This distinction mattered. The business needed quick wins they could ship immediately alongside a longer-term vision. I structured every recommendation as either tactical (fixable now) or strategic (requires investment) — so leadership could act on Monday morning, not just nod at a strategy deck.
One of the hardest design problems was the Parcelforce journey for sending larger parcels. The Royal Mail app handled standard parcels natively, but anything above the size threshold redirected users to the Parcelforce responsive web experience — a completely separate platform with its own UI, navigation, and login.
The ideal solution was a unified send journey. But the technical reality was that Parcelforce operated on a separate system, and integrating it natively wasn’t on the roadmap. So the design challenge became: how do you redirect users to a different platform without breaking their trust or losing them entirely?
A less visible but equally important piece of work: the cookie acceptance policy. Marketing needed consent tracking to measure campaign effectiveness and gather usage statistics. The existing implementation was either non-compliant or so aggressive it drove users away.
I designed a cookie consent flow that met marketing’s requirements for statistical tracking while respecting the user’s attention. The approach balanced regulatory compliance (GDPR, PECR) with UX best practice — clear language, genuine choice, and a design that didn’t obstruct the first 10 seconds of every session. This sounds simple, but getting the copy, timing, and dismissal behaviour right required multiple iterations and stakeholder alignment between legal, marketing, and product.
The work I delivered across three months wasn’t just an assessment document — it was a shift in how the organisation thought about its digital experience. The journey redesigns, user testing findings, and strategic recommendations were adopted by Royal Mail’s digital leadership and formed the basis of a 12-month customer-centric roadmap.
The improvements that followed — including journey fixes I directly designed — contributed to lifting the App Store rating to 4.6 stars. But the harder-to-measure outcome was cultural: stakeholders who had been making decisions based on assumptions saw real users struggle with their product. That changes how a team prioritises.
The best design decision is sometimes “be honest about the limitation.” The Parcelforce redirect couldn’t be eliminated. But it could be made transparent. Designing an explicit handoff moment — rather than hiding the transition — was a better outcome than a technically perfect integration that wasn’t going to happen. Honesty in design is underrated.
User testing is the fastest way to align a room. Three months of strategy work can be undone by one stakeholder who disagrees. But showing that same stakeholder a video of a real user failing at their product — that creates alignment that no slide deck can. I ran testing not just to find problems, but to build consensus.
Compliance work is design work. Cookie consent, privacy policies, regulatory requirements — these are design problems, not legal checkboxes. The cookie flow I designed had to satisfy three competing stakeholders (legal, marketing, users) simultaneously. That’s interaction design. It just doesn’t look glamorous in a portfolio.