Canada Post
Redesigning the responsive mobile navigation to create a quicker, simpler, and more intuitive way for visitors to access the tools, services and information they need on Canada Post’s website.
Year
2021 (3 months)
Role
Product Designer
Contribution
UX, Visual/UI, Prototype
PROBLEM
Canada Post is the national postal service of Canada, serving over 17.8 million residential and business customers. Despite its scale, the website's mobile navigation made it surprisingly difficult for everyday users to find basic information.
The information architecture had grown organically over years. Layers of nested menus, inconsistent labelling, and a structure that made sense internally but didn't reflect how users actually thought about the service. Users who couldn't find what they needed on the site were calling customer support instead. Every failed navigation moment had a direct cost.
Goal
Ensure the Canada Post website navigation enables visitors to find and discover the information they need in order to reach their goals.
CRITICAL RESEARCH INSIGHTS
To understand where the navigation was failing we looked at insights presented by the research team through usability tests and card sorting.
Not all users arrive at the homepage. Google remains a major entry point for visitors to get to the website.
When having difficulty locating information, the majority of the users attempt to use search, followed by contacting support and lastly default to looking at tools.
Users want to be “in and out” of the website. Activities requiring more effort or clicks are deemed difficult and tedious.
CPC is not associated with online shopping. Some participants had or have no awareness that Canada Post has an online store.
Users pull from what they already know. Users take advantage of previous knowledge and experience to help them find what they need.
Several navigation labels were seen as confusing, repetitive, or holding multiple or conflicting meanings.
CRITICAL RESEARCH INSIGHTS
To understand where the navigation was failing we looked at insights presented by the research team through usability tests and card sorting.
Not all users arrive at the homepage. Google remains a major entry point for visitors to get to the website.
Users want to be “in and out” of the website. Activities requiring more effort or clicks are deemed difficult and tedious.
Users pull from what they already know. Users take advantage of previous knowledge and experience to help them find what they need.
When having difficulty locating information, the majority of the users attempt to use search, followed by contacting support and lastly default to looking at tools.
CPC is not associated with online shopping. Some participants had or have no awareness that Canada Post has an online store.
Several navigation labels were seen as confusing, repetitive, or holding multiple or conflicting meanings.
DEFINING THE OFFERS JOURNEY
I partnered with fellow designers to map the end-to-end offer user journey, creating a shared artefact that made friction points in offer discovery impossible to ignore. The journey map became our north star. It gave stakeholders a common language and grounded every subsequent design decision in member behaviour.
To validate what we were seeing, I partnered with researchers to run a comparative usability test between the current site and a proposed future state, asking members to complete one task: find an offer relevant to them.
What it revealed reframed the entire project: The real problem wasn't that members couldn't find offers. It was that they couldn't make sense of them.
DESIGN SYSTEM FOUNDATION
Offer tiles had no consistent CTA language or value presentation, making it hard for members to scan, compare, and act.
Working alongside a fellow designer, I collaborated with developers to define reusable tile variants, standardize CTA logic, and document updated specs and use cases for each offer type. This created a consistent foundation that reduced noise for members and gave us a scalable system to build on.
DISCOVERABILITY OF OFFERS
With a consistent offer tile foundation in place, the next challenge was volume. Members needed a way to navigate hundreds of offers without search, which was out of scope. We harmonized the offer taxonomy into 14 intuitive categories (such as apparel, electronics, and food) surfaced directly on the offers homepage. Borrowing a pattern familiar from e-commerce, this gave members a fast, intuitive way to self-select into what was relevant to them, without needing to scroll through lengthy pages.
PERSONALIZATION & MERCHANDISING
Surfacing categories on the homepage brought clarity but without a clear merchandising strategy, the homepage shelves lacked logic and user relevance. Marketing had no guidelines for packaging offers effectively, leading to inconsistent execution and repetition of offers.
The vision was to surface offers based on member behaviour, tier status, and spending patterns, but without the legal and backend infrastructure in place, full personalisation wasn't yet possible.
Rather than wait, we identified an interim opportunity: a structured merchandising layer that could deliver relevance in the near term.
I facilitated a collaborative workshop with marketing and product teams to define a shelf strategy from the ground up. Together we brainstormed shelf themes — seasonal moments, popular categories, and partner-driven collections, and established the logic for how and when each would appear.
I created a set of merchandising templates with clear usage rules and asset direction, giving marketing a repeatable, scalable system to execute against.
Finally, I partnered with engineering to build the shelf logic into the product. This resulted in building a scalable system that let marketing execute consistently and a foundation ready to evolve into full personalisation as infrastructure catches up.
Results
34%
Affiliate offer loads are attributed to Avion app and web which is a 90% MoM increase on surface, and beats the previous 25% on surface.129%
MoM increase in Affiliate earns per earner on Avion app and web to its highest level ever to 2.2 (previous high was 1.3).
~ Marketing operations improved with guidelines and templates.
~ Team alignment improved with the offers journey roadmap.
~ Dev/design efforts reduced through reusable components.