Royal Mail is literally the opposite of user-centered

Last week my friend, Rachael got married.

I ordered her a gift using MoonPig and arranged delivery for Tuesday (the day she’d arrive back).

But on Monday I received this email:

Royal Mail email telling me they are delivery the gift Monday AM

Yes, MoonPig let me choose the date and then ignored it.

Also the email was addressed to Rachael, not me.

Anyway, I clicked the big red “View delivery options” button expecting to see some delivery options, but I got this:

A page with details about the delivery with a button to allow you to update delivery options

No delivery options.

So I clicked the big red “Update delivery options” button, again expecting to see the delivery options, but I got this:

A page saying to choose a delivery option but there’s a form asking you to enter the delivery postcode.

Still no delivery options (even though the page tells me to choose one).

Lots of UI issues here, but I found Rachael’s postcode and submitted the form and ended up here:

A page with delivery times and methods. No submit button.

Woohoo - some delivery options.

I selected a new delivery date “Wed 20 Nov 2024” from the drop down menu.

But I didn’t know what to do because:

There was no clear path to proceed
It seemed like you had to pick a delivery method but I wanted to stick with delivering the gift to Rachael (which there was no option for).

So I WhatsApp’d Rachael to rant to her about the sh*tty UX. (I wouldn’t normally rant about UX to my friends. But she’s a product manager so she gets it.)

During my rant I realised there was actually an option to deliver to Rachael - it was labelled “Deliver to my address”.

Royal Mail’s entire journey had been acting as if I was Rachael (the recipient) instead of me (the bearer of gifts).

Literally the opposite of user-centered design.

So here’s my redesign:

A page with radio buttons for delivery options and a submit button saying Continue.

Radio buttons make it obvious that you need to do something.
The current method is pre-selected so it’s easier to know what’s going on.
The submit button shows you how to proceed.

Way better.

But honestly even this isn’t that good.

If you’d like to find out what ‘that good’ looks like, you might like my course, Form Design Mastery. It’ll teach you to design forms that are approximately 100x better than Royal Mail’s:

https://formdesignmastery.com

Here’s a testimonial I received just last week:

Forms are one of the trickiest parts of UX. Following Adam’s newsletter for quite some time, I wanted to give his course a try and I’m really glad I did because it gives clear foundations to build great forms as well as a lot of tips, hints and information on the reasons behind every decision and impact on the overall form experience. This helped me improve our conversion and provide advice to our engineers. Totally worth the cost!

– Simon Vandereecken, Product Designer at Checkout.com

Cheers,
Adam