From sunset to sunrise. How Australia Post is empowering e-commerce

Transcript

1. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 PETE JOHNSON: Thank you. Thanks for joining me today and thank you to UX Australia for having me. It's exciting to be up here and not just in the audience for once. My name is Pete Johnson, I'm a product manager at Australia Post and look after online parcel sending. Previously to taking on the project manager role I was UX lead over the last few years as we worked on our parcel sending proposition for our customers and predominantly our contract customers. It's not this clicker after all. There we go. We're away. Weal start with a quick overview of online shopping in Australia. Australia Post puts out this publication each year and gives us a really interesting insight into what is happening in the buying habits of Australians in the marketplace and it's interesting how much coverage we have, over 73% of households are shopping online; 10% of our retail spend is now online. What is interesting to see is 10% doesn't sound like a lot but at the moment we're experiencing I think up to 30% or 25% year on year growth so e-commerce, in Australia I think it's seen as being a bit behind the rest of the world but at the same time we're growing rapidly. Interesting to see when we like to purchase. Obviously in between meals is the best times and after dinner being the peak period when we like to do our purchasing. And what devices we like to use. It's interesting they all break up into thirds at the moment but what's interesting to me is the fact the mobiles, the year on year growth is almost 30% and that's where the future direction we see is growing more and more as people rely more on their hand-held devices to do more and more of their online activities. If we look at how the online purchases break up in terms of segments, I don't think it was a huge amount of surprise obviously department stores and fashion are big. Interesting thing is something like health and beauty is growing at 30% year on year so that's a big growth area for online at the moment. And how we pay. Pay Pal I was surprised how much pay pal is ahead of everything else. Buy now pay later is interesting. It's in infancy at the moment and I was reading last week how I think the flexy group have struck a deal with master cart to get into that space as well now that a big credit card organisation is getting involved it will be interesting to see how that now plays out into the future and growth in that area. Then we have the big five, the big five weeks. These five weeks account for 15% of all online transactions in Australia and they're really driven by Click Frenzy, the lead up to Black Friday and then Black Friday and Cyber Monday and two to three weeks before Christmas. I guess most of you know if you want to order online and have your presents delivered in time for Christmas Day and get a bit of free time before they're un wrapped you need to get out there and get in a bit early to get them early. What does this mean for Australia Post? Last financial year, we delivered over 222 million parcels throughout Australia and with our biggest day being over 2 million parcels so if you thing about that, that's 2 million parcels that come in to Australia Post, we have to sort through them, work out where they're going, put them on trucks, airplanes, put them on the back of a posty's bike and get them to you and that's one day in that peak period there's a range of weeks that
2. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 2 of 12 lack similar to that. The beauty from our point of view and my point of view is working in head office we're asked to go out to our delivery centres, out to our distribution centres and post offices and help out and get on the front line with our people and with our customers and it is a great opportunity to actually see how everything works at Ground Zero. So the area I work in at Australia Post really sits in between transaction and the delivery network so you do the purchase online, it goes into our delivery network. What happens in between, that's where we work with our merchants to fill the space. It is about creating shipments, printing labels and handing the shipments to us so we can get them delivered to you. We have a reasonable sized team working on this at the moment. It's headed up by the product team which is a bit more business focused. We have a strong UX team of UX designers, content, research and a producer. We have our BAs, back end, front end developers and our QAs and that's a bigger train. We operate under, I guess, a safe methodology so scaled, agile for enterprise. Heard it lovingly referred to as slow agile. And I guess the main area I focus in is with the UX team and front end developers. We do have three API teams as well that make up that back end set so it's a pretty big team. As I mentioned with the API, we're fundamentally a platform play and so the big end of town shipping large volume, they'll integrate directly with our API and business services and however our UI and the new UI we're developing is a gateway into those APIs and we've got a hybrid version where we use our UI and do a livint gragsz and it is quicker to pipe shipments into APIs. This is parcel send. It has been in the works about two years. It relies on the API capability that sits underneath it and it's been a big project. What I'm going to do today is talk about some of the complexities, some of the challenges we face along that way and some of those learnings we got out of it. So, probably the last you'll see of the application and we'll talk more about the problems we faced. Tem, we've had the application in market for about a year. We've got 2000 merchants, they've shipped about 700,000 shipments, that's kneg to grow significantly. We're looking at having 10,000 much nlts, over 4 million shipments a year so we have to be mindful about how we create the application and wroed map to scale accordingly and reliability is a big thing as well. A couple of challenges we faced initially at the very start of the project was around research and time and access. Essentially, because this is linked, this development of this new Parcel Send application t is actually linked to a big migration proposition and migration project which is going to take - happen over a number of years and so we had a delivery schedule that was already set for us. The developers were at iteration zero, already getting the foundations in place and we were now having two brands so Australia Post bought Star Track a couple of years back and we were the first application that brought the two brands together in the one application and that pent we needed double the insights, two brands, two sets of insights for one application and we had limited research available to us and had to get moving straight away.
3. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 3 of 12 While we were developing what our research plan would be, we hunted for as much internal research as we could get our hands on. We were fortunate enough we'd done ethnographic research with one of our merchant two or three months previously, wept on site to see the nitty- gritty of how they were fulfilling e-commerce purchases online in their warehouse and shipping them out and then we also looked around for voice and customer reports, Australia Post being big it does research but is not user experience research, it is market research. We had to grab all we could and it give us a picture of our users, a picture of their needs and their pains but it because an incomplete picture but that's had we had at that point in time. For us at that point in time we had to be honest about the communication we did and didn't have and communicate clearly to stakeholders and around the business and get the buy-in of the assumptions, rationale and risks we were taking and how we might mitigate the risks. By communicating that, the stakeholders were the ones that could change the delivery schedule if they really wanted to. As it earns out they didn't want to. At least they were on board with what we were doing and how we would try and mitigate those risks. The next thing we died to help mitigate risks was sliced our features as thinly as possible while still delivering value to the users and business. We hear about MVP and it's almost become a dirt aword but trying to not get too deep in to the development without having validation beforehand. The same time we were planning out our research, we now realise we're going to have to plan out our validation post development so it's a little bit cart before the horse if you will but it just meant we would have to go out and make sure we were heading in the right direction and if we weren't we were going to have to make quick changes and a big part of that was negotiating to have capacity in your delivery schedule tool make the changes and optimisation. We were setting ourselves up knowing every time you go in to user testing, into validation you're going to find gaps, problems, inconsistencies, things you didn't think of. We knew that was going to hap sewn had to be ready for it when it happened. That worked really well and the business really were on board and happy for us to mitigate our risks in that nature. The next challenge was actually. If any of you worked in a large organisation, normally account managers or sales own the relationship with customers and normally you have to go through those people to access the customers and so we spoke with our stakeholders and everyone was full of promises and great intentions about all the people they could connect us with. The merchants we would chat to, the broad range of experiences we'd get to explore and understand and so we made those connection, spoke to account managers and sales people about the fantastic UX research project we had, how excited we were about it. You know how many research opportunities we got out of that? Zero. Turns out selling UX research can be pretty tough especially if you're coming at it from very much an UXer's point of view. Something we didn't do but learned we really had to do was we had to UX our account team. We had to get a strong understanding of what is value for them. Where does meaning and value and benefit lie for them? What are they trying to achieve? Watt
4. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 4 of 12 are the outcomes they want? How are they trying to service our customers who are our customers? We re reviewed how we put the proposition out and it became how do you like your customers to help us create our sending application, the one they'll be using? That rrs reframed it in a view that suit account managers. They thought, fantastic, that sounds like a good thing for me, my customer will be into that, we can build a stronger relationship, build trust and the customer will like it influence. Contract customers are shipping more than a thousand shipments a year, a lot are sending 10,000, 20,000 shipments a year, serious business, and they understand inflounces things is an important thing and if they can influence what you're doing to their benefit they're going to be excited about that so that was the new tact we took. We also had to be creative with this as well. Because not long after we started getting these session up and running, sales were soft and the organisation put an embargo on any research happening with customers so we were on the back foot again, we weren't allowed to talk to customers. Only sales people could make sales calls so we thought how are we reframing what we're doing? Maybe we're not going out to do a research session, maybe we're going to assist on a sales call or to do a product demo. It is reframing how you're approaching your research and I guess one of the really key things we learned is we had a great plan. Our UX researcher was fantastic and we had exciting initiatives we wanted to do but reality is we were going to have to compromise and in the end a little bit of compromise would mean we'd get lot of insight, whereas no compromise would equal no insights so we knew the way we had to move forward. Next was more a design challenge and we're looking at do we use designers or go down the jobs to be done path? Obviously with your research you want to get out there, you want to collect as much information about your users as you possibly can. You want to turn that into strong understanding and directional insights that actually lead you to understanding and defining the outcomes you're frying to achieve for users. What are the outcomes your users want to achieve? What does success look like? Rrp o, through our research we identified nine user roles. These weren't personas, they were roles and lent themselves to this idea of tasks and jobs to be done. What's more, one person could fulfil a number of those roles as their job or even in a day-to-day proposition. We have one of our merchants is a husband and wife team selling a four-wheel drive accessories for camping. They're shipping 250 - approximately 250 shipments a day. There's two of them. The wife works in the front office doing more of the customer service, the husband is out in the warehouse fulfilling the orders. These are two people managing all these different roles so a persona wasn't going to cut it. Another thing we really learned about personas was personas are goal and attribute focused whereas jobs to be done is about what is the task you're trying to complete? What is the outcome? What is inmotivation and outcome you're looking for? At the same time, I'd picked up an e-book by Intercom. They've got a great blog inside intercom can the e-book is on jobs to be done and this resonated with me. It talked about the failings of personas from their point of view and talked about how jobs to be done could actually work for them more efficiently and effectively. Don't get me wrong, I'm not here to slam personas, I think
5. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 5 of 12 they've got a viable proposition for different contexts but for our context it wasn't going to work. What I lovered about what Intercom had done is they created what they called job stories. Jobs to be done came out from clay Christian son and some of his colleague I think at Harvard and was marketing focused in terms of selling milk shakes or Snickers but was great to see the work Intercom had done to take it further into a product rel anymore look at what's the situation, what's the motivation and what's the outcome? This became a really powerful tool for us in terms of setting up for our design. Before we got the sketches or anything, how do we set up a foundation for us to meet the outcomes we're rying to achieve? This is an example of one of the ones we do. It's not rocket science. I don't profess we're very good at it even but it really helps us get into the right mental space and set up the right foundation as I uz wa saying. Another thing we liked and stole from Intercom and you'll notice about this from me y like to look out and see what is out there and then grab it and use it for ourselves. I thing you've heard you can borrow like a designer or steal like an artist. I choose to steal like an artist. This is our feature canvas like a presketch ing phase of proposition, nailing down what is the problem you're dealing with? What is the context of what you're doing? What does success look like? What are the outcomes you're trying to achieve? This formed a good basis for us to move forward and get stakeholders on board and get the team onboard about where we're heading with a feature. The next complexities we looked at were the fact we had two brands and lot of inconsistency. As I mentioned, Australia poers bought Star Track and many years before that Star Track bought Australian air express so we almost had three brands within it so fundamentally there's synergies between the two brands but at the same time there's different products, different business requirements, different operational requirements, different contract structures and they're quite different in their heritage. Australia Post is over 200-year-old postal organisation, it has a strong community service ethic. It has defined things about what it will and won't do and how those things happen whereas Star Track is a 30 or 40-year-old logistics company who want to be more flexible not necessarily always are but try to be more flexible to meet the needs of customers so when it came to even business requirements, Australia Post business requirements were very, "Yes, we need X, Y, Z," whereas on the flip side, Star Track, depending who you spoke to, they could change a bit and that's something we used to our advantage in the end, if business requirements became a bit vague we'd push and nudge them in the right direction so they worked for our customers. The other problem or complexity we were facing was in consistency. When I first started in this logistics space about three years ago, I figured getting something from A to B without doing it yourself is probably as old as man is. It's been arpfor thousands of years, that problem. I figured with technology and so on today it would be a very homogenised process, it would be simple and straight forward and everyone would kind of do it the same way. I couldn't have been more wrong. We had this dichotomy of the way customers would outwardly appear so you would have a slick looking business, great marketing, great website, fantastically designed products. You go into
6. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 6 of 12 their warehouse and they're still hands writing things and using carbon paper from 30 years ago, that's crazy. You go way out to the outer suburbs, we went far enough out - we're based in Melbourne and the cab driver said, "I can't take you that far out." Luckily we talked him into it and we get to this non script shabby-looking warehouse, walk in and it's got the latest technology, fully integrated and absolutely humming, it's so efficient it's amazing. So there's this dichotomy of what a company looks like and how they do business in the background can be very different and how they go about it can be completely different again. Actually, just while we're on that, merchants traditionally have had to bend their processes to their supplier or carrier so if you were to ship with a certain shipping company they'd give you a piece of software and say, "That's how you have to do it." And you didn't have a choice. That was a big thing we wanted to move back and provide lot more flex frblts people in the marketplace. So we looked at the process architecture of a shipment, about life cycle point of view. When you're up to a high level we could go, yeah, it does look consistent, everybody falls into this configure, prepare, dispatch, transport and receive proposition, fantastic and obviously the key ones we're interested in are prepare and then obviously dispatch but you won't be able to read this but I hope it starts to communicate - when you've got down another level of granularity into how they did that in their ware hashouse, things got really quickly really quickly. This diagram shows how some muchance do it. The different colours are for different user roles. We were trying to connect up when are they printing, when are they launching and packing? Everybody does it differently. Some companies print literally 1200 labels in one hit and take those and put them on the parcels. Others will print one at a time and move through that way and then there's plenty in between as well. Some of them are printing 4 at a time because they've only got an A4 printer and the label stock's on 4 art basics label so their hole process is driven by their printer. It is really quite amazing. So it's really made me thing about this side of zoom levels. Andy polaine who spoke today gave an interesting talk at UX Australia a few years ago in Melbourne referencing the short film Powers of 10 looking at the idea of scale, how if you zoom out by the power of 10 what would things look like and alternatively going back down. Jump into it on YouTube, it is about a 9-minute view. Really cool. I used to be an architect so the idea of zooming at different levels is prevalent in architec ture, how does the spanse work at product level, site level, street level, it became an important technique in developing the product. From a logistics point of viewerse what's that overall life cycle? That kinds of seems consistent but as soon as we got into a warehouse the consistency started falling apart a bit. We looked at fulfillment in the warehouse, consistency was disappearing again. If you looked at the interactions that happen in the fulfillment of each step and then do they pack and then fill the box and when do they put the label on? We had to do a lot of ethnographic research to grapple with that and then look at things at different zoom levels to find the patterns, finds the gaps and work out strategies to deal with those in terms of developing into a user interface. Same with UIs. Looking at UIs within that marketplace and then our UI, how does it work within the group of applications that it has to operate in? How does the processes within the application work? How does that form work and at a field level as well, how does that work?
7. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 7 of 12 Where are the commonalities? Where are the gaps? Where are the pattern s? That extended to language as well. The CX research said language was kind of varied. There's some very industry-set language but then people kinds of use whatever else they want s as well so we've gone for something we hope and through our testing is understood so that's fantastic. A little bit of logistics 101 so say you've bought a pair of shoes online, that's the item. A parcel is the satchel it sits in with the label on it. A shipment has one or multiple parcels going to the same destination and then the manifest is a whole group of parcels that a merchant is then giving to the carrier to send out to the consumers. So we had to look at our language that way and had to look at the contract structures that way as well like how the businesses operate with Australia Post, with Star Track at the same time. And another interesting tactic we used, we started to change language around certain things to try and abstract certain notions especially in the contract space where the word account was getting used for multiple things at multiple levels and it was getting confusing. By changing thingsx abstracting that's a cost centre not necessarily a location or a geographic spot, it's not a charge account number, trying to differentiate and abstract things and try and make sense of them, try to pull them into a coherency as well was really important. Another challenge was the fact that this was a big migration process. These are some of our legacy applications. You can judge the designs for our is.. But you can see they're trying to fit as much as they can into the screen in one shot and that's something we really wanted to move away from. Thenisting one, the red one, the Australia Post one, from a user experience point of view it looks a little questionable but from a capable point of view it is amazing the richness of capability that sits within this application that's now 10 years old is fantastic. Learning how to use it is a little bit of a challenge. So, we're going to replace all these 20 legacy applications and develop just one Parcel Send application that's going to be THE Parcel Send application for this organisation. And that was to help facilitate this multiyear migration process and that's why the business was really pushing that delivery schedule. They knew they had to migrate customers, they knew when they wanted to get them off and what the no was so we had to work closely with the migration proposition. We had to become the target application so we had to reach a certain tipping point before we had enough capability andier glad to say we're now at that point last week where we are now the target application so all new contract customers come on to Parcel Send which is an exciting time for us as a team. One of the design managers at the outletset said I don't want you to look at existing legacy applications and I understand this from a point of view that we didn't want to design the past looking like today, we wanted to design for the future. However, it didn't sit completely right with me because I feel like you can learn a lot from those legacy applications, you just have to be disciplined in not repeating them or just copying them. And so, the approach we took and this was driven by one of our UX team members, was we set our foundations, that's our approach, that's our job stories, we got our wire frames going and then internally validated our wire frames against our exiting applications and tried to get some learnings out of that, see if we missed something, see if there was better richness within that legacy application we could learn from
8. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 8 of 12 and then that facilitated the first iteration loop in terms of do we go back to wire frames, we're were happy with that go through user testing and go through that iteration process as well. It helped us to not design the past again but to keep designing for the future but learning from the past at the same time which was really important. A lot of you might have heard the Henry Ford quote, customers can have any colour they want as long as it's black. We were told that we could have any capability in the application we wanted as long as it existed in the API. Now, the API obviously through necessity is developed quicker than the UI and it delivers essentially a whole range of business service s to a range of customers from big to spall customers and seemingly small changes you want to make within that API can have significant downstrome effects so all the data will flow down into invoicing, into tracking, or it can flow down into operation those one piece of data you see over here and your going why on earth do we need that piece of data, it seems irrelevant, for someone down in operations who's trying to make sure that parcel gets delivered to the right place at the right time that's to really important piece of information so important to have the strong understanding of the greater system you're dealing with. Once again, we learn to develop features to the ideal state. We learned this in our early research methodologies where we didn't know everything, we were going to have to post- validate the proposition we were putting out so we were cutting things thinly. This had to keep happening and we encourage ourselves as a team to go, "What is the best this could be? We don't want to be the best in post, we don't want to be the best in logistics, how can we make this is world leading application?" It is a great aspiration to have, how can we make it better for customers and users? Then how do we slice that back into an is set of releases so we can release something today that will see value for our customers today and for ourselves and that we can learn from and keep releasing the slices of the feature to build up that experience and that's been, I guess, a strategy that's worked really well for us when we've encountered a number of different problems along the way, whether it's research, whether it's API capability, whether it's dealing with legacy applications. And also, by having that ideal end state, what has been dubbed by the API team as the gold plated experience, we were able to sell in what we were trying to achieve not only for the business, to the API team and to our key stakeholders so they could see the direction wire going and buy into that direction and what that enable us to do, you start to develop features and start to fluence that API road map one of the great things hat happened and we were doing a bulk import proposition and the first cut was simp ballistic, if a shipment had an error it wouldn't go into our system. You could either just import the good ones, back out the bad ones and fix them or start over but we weren't happy with that. We didn't want that. That wasn't good enough. The next release incorporated a new end point for the APIs which is the validation end point or super quick validation end point. You could throw 1,000 shipments at the end point and it would go to go rb good, bad, work out the errors in 10 to 15 seconds. This meant we were creating value from a uI perspective and also for customers in API perspective they could use validation end point to enhance how they provided validation to Australia Post and provide efficiency for shipping. Knowing where you want to go and being able to sell the message helped the advancement of the zaupsition we were coming forward with.
9. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 9 of 12 Another one, we didn't have a product manager at this point in time. I was UX lead, we had an UX team, we had developers and head of program and she was doing a fantastic job. She was very outwardly facing so she looked out to industry, to marketplace, what the business was doing, where technology was at which was fantastic. She did such a good job. She got a promotion to GM which was wonderful but we were missing I guess the product owner, product manager role in our hierarchy. It was Ozzing a few issues for the team. We lacked a really strong vision. We kinds of knew where our objectives were. They weren't really solid. We were really focused on delivering a focused application. We all hear about feature bloat. Applications are trying to become all things to all people and not really doing anything that well. That's nottioning we wanted to be. We wanted to keep a streamlined focus application so to do this we really needed a bit more foundation work around us to make sure we could follow that path. Another key thing was we really didn't have a lot of vision in front of us about what was coming. We could see three months ahead about what was coming down the road map and that's it. I think the team in general wanted a lot more, I guess, I don't think security is the right word but assurity and understanding of what's our direction and where are we head sfg from an UX team point of view, a number of us stepped up and said we're going to fulfil this role, we'll take on these responsibilities and let's try and develop something that will be really useful for us. So we started off by running a number of workshops with our key stakeholders in the business the team to lock oun our objectives and our objectives became super important. This idea of flexibility. As I said,aw Is for shipping in the past have been bend your business to the UI, this is how we do it. We wanted to change that, we wanted to say here's our UI, not only is it flexible and will meet you now, we wanted to be able to be flexible enough that you can optimise your process those you can become a more efficient and better business. It has to be simple. The people who use this can range from Masters degrees, MBA, logistics managers down to warehouse workers with limited education and even potentially some minor cognitive disability. So the usability scale on this is enormous and that was actually one of the really joyful things, we did some user testing and we had a paper prototype, this is quite early and we had one of the warehouse workers whose job all day was to stuff T-shirts into satchels. His name was Mickey. He didn't have a high level of education, was a lovely guy, came in and took his user testing seriously. He wanted to do a really good job. Interesting thing was we got to the end of the session and he said, "That was so much fun." It was just so heart-warming to feel like some of the work we were doing and validating the people's opinions even on the warehouse floor was important to them, made them feel good about what they were doing and what they could bring to the table about what could influence their work. That simplicity has beenee key for us. Speed is also important. We want speed to come out of that simplicity. Ultimately, from a business point of view, the more shipments you can push out the door the more transactions you can do. Works for everybody. Those top three really focused on our application and gave us a lot of ability to say when a new feature came in from a stakeholder and they said, "We want to do this in the application," it enabled us to step back and go does that meet one of these three objectives? It helped us - it was the first stage in helping us push back to not some of the best suggestions
10. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 10 of 12 or not the best requests for what people wanted to do with the application. Other things we.Ed to get across were access. We wanted our customers to access our products and services easily and quickly and the business ed to get them to market quickly and efficiently. We wanted to be able to adapt to our customers' needs both from a technology point of view but a product and service point of view as well. We wanted to be a partner and it was important to be one solution so we're going from this fragmented multiapplication proposition, we wanted to provide one coherent proposition. Next thing we needed to do was develop our vision and isis a statement that would help guide us as well and once again it was organized around - we organized it around a range of workshop s. We got the API developers who didn't really work on Parcel Sends, we got everyone involved and it was a great process to dig into what would the success of Parcel Send mean to our merchants and our organisation? We focused on needs and problems of merchants and benefits and reasons to buy. Around the same time, I was reading a book called "product road maps "s relaunched sorry. Don't be fooled by the glasses. It has a fantastic value proposition template in it. This book is a good resource. If you're interested in product management and that is side of things, it an effective how-to guide about developing your road map. From a workshop point of view, for people who didn't naturally write visions and weren't naturally inclined to write vision statementatise was a great way to get that process started in the workshops. This is also from the book, is like a precanned statement where you can start to work in that information that you've already gleaned into this statement to get you in the mood and flow of actually going and developing this statement. A number of themes came out and it was great because we had really good consistency from API developers and supports there and support teams all the way through to the business and key stakeholders and these are five of the key themes which led to our vision statement. Seamlessly fit merchant processes so they can send more faster and that looks at how the themes fit into that. The fact we included our business stakeholders, included support, include ld the teams. Everybody had a stake in this, everybody had buy in and it's enabled us now to really keep our applications streamlined and focused. Reporting has come up as a key thing and part of the business is going we have to have reporting in and we walk them through the vision. We walk them through our objectives and they've been part of setting those and they can understand now, OK, this isn't the right play so instead of us saying no you can't have reporting we're saying Parcel Send is not the right place but let's have a discussion about what could be the right place and how we move forward in the need for you and customers. That's been an important thing to enable the team to come around and focus and feel more meaning in what we're doing and enabled the road map to get developed. We've developed the road map to the end of 2020. The features we're proposing in the last quarter of 2020 are probably not worth the value of the paper they're written on but it is giving us a direction. We know can the direction is going to change and as our user needs change and the business focus changes we'll adapt and move with that but it gives the team a sense of security about where they're heading and what we're
11. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 11 of 12 trying to achieve and how we're going to achieve and that's really important. So, to finish up, we faced lot of different challenges along the way and lot of the key things we learned were all about stepping up and no-one's ever going to work in a perfect system or perfect process or perfect business and then you're going to see gaps as professionals and you're going to want to wonder why aren't we doing that? We used to say why don't we have a product owner until a few of us said let's do it, step into the space, fill the gap and enable it for the betterment of the team. I don't think it matters where you're at in your career or skill level if you're not confident to step into it by yourself, grab a cal colleague, a team-mate, someone more senior had to help you. It is great way to broaden your capability and your experience and create better experiences for your customers as well. I think the final two big things we learned from this were the fact that always communicate. Always communicate with your stakeholders, always communicate with your team. Something we're doing now is - I showed you the feature canvas, that's been stepped up again to another level by our new lead product designer into an experience canvas and that experience canvas goes to a kick off meeting that has every stakeholder from support to business, development, QA, everybody's there and everybody works to fill that in together to identify the gaps, the needs, what success looks like, the outcomes. Research has a huge part to play in that as well and it creates this wonderful foundation for us to really understand where we're at and where we're going and having that communication constantly working. Don't let yourself fall into an UX silo or just design silo. Constantly talk to everybody around you and share what rour doing and get them on board with your journey, will make it simpler and more effective and you'll be able to deliver far better experiences to your users. Finally, always move forward. One thing we learned early on when we didn't have the research we needed and we just had to keep moving forward. Make your decision. Make the best decision you can with the information you have. Communicate the assumptions. Communicate those risks. Keep going forward. The planning capability - if you make a mistake, because you will, God knows we did as well, we have been able to go back because we've had the space. We've identified our risk to say, "We're going to push this feature off a bit. We've got to fix things existing in the application right now for users." So that capability to constantly move forward I think is really important in developing a really great product. That's it. Thank you very much. (Applause) STEVE BATY: Thanks, Pete. We have time for some questions for Pete on that wonderful case study before we head out so if you have a question, pop your hand up, I'll come over with the microphone so we can hear it and record it. SPEAKER: Hi, Pete. I just have one question. You were talking about involving everybody on the team. I know one of the things that I've experienced and probably a lot of people in the UX community is having too many cooks in the kitchen. Can you talk about how you dealt with that, or did you run into any issues with that sort of thing? PETE JOHNSON: Absolutely and I think when you're approaching these sessions, having a clear agenda about what you want to go through and what you want to get out of the session is
12. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 12 of 12 really important. I feel like if you walk in and say, "We're going to play this feature. What do people think?" That kind of invites chaos. If you go in with a really structured approach, well, structured enough - you need flexibility in it but I think - and by having a document, something like the experience canvas or feature canvas, enables that to be a more structured discussion and if you have - it can be an UX, doesn't matter who leads the discussion as long as they know, OK, research, we're looking to you to provide input around the problem space. We want to understand in metrics from a business proposition, what is the business challenge you're facing? Engaging the groups for their strengths and hearing what else they can add around that as well. I think having strong facilitation and have a good agenda to work through generally works well. I thinkologist these sessions are a really good opportunity to enable people to feel heard. People have ideas, people have thoughts, people have concerns and need to get them off their chest. If they feel heard they can walk away knowing you've accepted that, you've thought about it, not shut it down straight away. You have taken it onboard and you're going to go think about it. When you come forward with your next proposition in terms of design you can talk about why you did or didn't address things and how that's going to work. I think people are more comfortable with that because they have felt heard, they haven't just been shut down straight away. Some business people can be pretty bullish and so enabling them to get their bullishness out and get that on the table, I think sort of softens them a bit for how you then move forward from that $. Does that answer your question? Yep. SPEAKER: Thank you, Peter. Thanks. PETE JOHNSON: Thank you very much.