Finally, USPS.com got nice look'n'feel | Hacker News Reader

Finally, USPS.com got nice look'n'feel

usps.com

57 pointshippich38 comments

IMO, the current price of a first-class domestic stamp should be right on the homepage.

On Google, in the suggested search box, if you type:

"how much is"

The first option to come up is "how much is a stamp"

I've performed this search myself many times because I don't mail letters often, but when I do, I go to the junk drawer to get a stamp, see a sheet of $0.42 stamps and wonder, "is that how much stamps are?" It's not. But to find this out, I had to do a search and dig.

HOWEVER, the first place I went was USPS.com, and since it wasn't right on the homepage, I went to Google instead of trying to browse around their site aimlessly.

That's why I've always got Forever Stamps since they came out. No more worrying.

What are Forever Stamps?

https://www.usps.com/communications/newsroom/forever_stamp_f... is broken. First result on Bing and Google. Google gave me the option to Block all www.usps.com results.

Its a stamp that costs whatever first class postage is when you buy it, but it's always good for that, no matter how much the rates go up. So the Forever stamp you paid $0.44 for now, you can still use it to mail a letter in 5 years, when stamps might be $0.70.

Depending on your country and postal service these are also known more generally as "non-denominated" or "non-value indicator" postage.

Actually, as of 2011 all first class USPS postage is non-denominated. So anyone purchasing new stamps should be covered.

When you're mailing something that needs more than one stamp, you still have to know the current value of that Forever Stamp.

That being said, the reason you can't just print postage online for anything but Priority/Express seems to be a really bad deal the USPS made with PitneyBowes.

Well, I like the new look, but they BROKE ALL OF THEIR LINKS and utterly failed to put 301 redirects in place. Google hasn't recrawled the site yet so all links from Google are broken. I just found this out because I'm looking for "media mail" shipping prices, and the first 3 USPS results in Google are all broken. Google will eventually recrawl them, but I'm sure there are many sites all over the web that link to their old pages, which is gonna hurt them bigtime, SEO-wise.

To anyone working on a site redesign: redirecting old URLs is one of those things that is easy to overlook, but it can make a huge difference in the way prospective visitors see your site. Do not neglect this important step.

Edit: also, their new search sucks, which makes the site nearly unusable. Again, I'm trying to find prices for Media Mail, and I know they have an entire page dedicated to it. But if I search media mail, look at these results:

https://www.usps.com/search.htm?q=media%20mail

The first two links aren't even on usps, they're on eBay! If I surround "media mail" with double quotes, I get better results, but naive users are rarely aware of this trick.

Same thing happened to me with the same searches. Their 404 page is not very helpful, and is dynamically generated, which means Goog's spider may not ever realize that the media mail page doesn't exist at that URL any more (see https://www.usps.com/send/waystosendmail/senditwithintheus/m... and look at the URL for an example).

i think it looks rather generic, like a web designer just used a pre-made "web 2.0" template. in particular, that light blue color is really overused and doesn't match the dark blue in their old logo (or are they going for a whole rebranding thing and losing the traditional dark-blue and red?) the old site at least had a unique look, even if it did look somewhat dated (http://web.archive.org/web/20101222000039/http://www.usps.co...).

it's also a bit strange that it doesn't say "postal service" anywhere except the <title>. i think more people know of them as the "post office" than "usps".

Probably, because of generic template and generic approach it is so clear where to look for what you need. generic stuff is not always bad. And this company do not need that much brand support to get down to colors marches. Just my IMHO.

The laptop is massively out of place as the largest image on the page. It looks like they're trying to sell me a computer. Plus the computer has an image of the website I'm already looking at.

"Watch Video" looks like they're going to talk about the laptop.

Then the image scrolls to a woman who is having way too much fun tracking her package. What a weird design.

If you search for the word "Post" it comes up in tiny type in the footer as "Postage." Not what I'd expect from the Post Office.

Yeah it's like a visual "Yo dawg" joke.

"We heard you liked USPS on your laptop, so we put USPS on a laptop on USPS on your laptop!"

Now only if they can figure out how to accurately track packages. For me their tracking almost never works (in other words never ever updated), and if it does it is usually updated after the packages have been delivered, which is useless.

I believe you have to upgrade the package to Priority Mail or similar to get UPS-style tracking. Otherwise you'll get simple delivery confirmation.

An improvement from their last design, but i really don't think it matters. I've spent maybe 15 minutes total of my life on USPS's homepage. What they really need to work on is their package tracking[1], which basically has two states: delivered and not delivered.

[1] Well, and their shipping reliability. Sending packages USPS is about 50/50 for me as to whether it will arrive at all.

EDIT: The 50/50 thing is hyperbole. It's more like 1 in every 10 or 15 packages will disappear.

Sending packages USPS is about 50/50 for me as to whether it will arrive at all.

Seriously? I've sent maybe 100 or so packages with USPS over the past few years. I don't think a single package hasn't shown up. A few have come in much later than expected (like a week rather than 3-days), but its one of the most reliable services I use.

I was sending literally hundreds of packages per month through USPS with maybe 1 lost package per 300. Their first class mail/parcel post is the least expensive and most reliable way to ship an item under 8 lbs.

A lot of people like to disparage them because they're a branch of the government but in my opinion they're the best in the industry for low to medium volume shippers.

If you want to see shitty shipping go try to use DHL.

People like to knock government services, but I have no complaints. I went to the DMV earlier this year - fast, polite service. I got a copy of my birth certificate at the office of records - the workflow was smooth and I was in and out in less than 10 minutes, despite the long lines. I filed for an EIN a few years back, and received a friendly call from a guy at the IRS who walked me through the form, explaining the fields and terminology, and confirmed everything over the phone. On point, standard air mail and priority mail have served me well for my business. Maybe I'm just lucky, but I'm usually impressed with how well our government services do run.

Well, they fixed the only thing I ever noticed on the old site... they no longer have a ZIP code field on the form for looking up a ZIP code by address. So, there's that.

Notably, the locator [1] for post offices (or collection boxes, etc.) is still unchanged.

My main use-case for this part of the site is to answer the question “where can I deposit mail and still have it collected today, without driving all the way to the main office?". The top-level results page only shows business hours, which do not exist for the collection boxes on the side of the road, and may even differ from collection times at the official locations. This is in addition to the lack of any Sort function to use this information.

In general, there could be more information presented, and better organized, to really take advantage of the space.

[1] http://usps.whitepages.com/post_office/

And the hold mail pages are still the same: https://holdmail.usps.com/holdmail/landingView.do

That somebody pushed a redesign through the biggest bureaucracy in the world (that lost $8,200,000,000 in 2010) is astounding.

That said:

a) They’re using low-contrast call-to-action buttons. It’s a sea of blue. USPS has red/white/blue in the palette – why not use red?

b) Their font size selection on many elements & sub-pages is equivalent to 8.5 point, for an audience that skews 35 years + that is a mistake.

c) Go check out http://mobile.usps.com/ - for usability which do you prefer?

I wonder how much conversion rate optimization could help close their funding gap . . .

Agreed on point A, that's the first thing I noticed. For better or worse, the red-white-blue (with the specific shades thereof) is a core part of USPS's brand, and is instantly recognizable for most people in this country.

To not use that is IMO a huge opportunity lost.

I've seen a few articles in the last year pointing out that the diff between the USPS being in the black or the red is the cost of funding health care in its pension system, something Congress mandated a few years back. This past year's funding they had to put aside $5.5 billion, IIRC.

I used to work for the company that did this site, AKQA DC, they do great work. This was a HUGE project and took 3.5 years to do.

Do they normally prefer Dojo to jQuery?

I believe that was a requirement by USPS. The guys in the DC office all prefer MooTools over anything else. Check out elderscrolls.com and some of their other sites.

Only the homepage was redesigned. It seems like all the pages off of it, where you actually do stuff, are unchanged. Like the calculate shipping page, or the store.

The shipping calculator has the particular annoyance of requiring you to provide a bunch of info that is often unnecessary. To/from ZIP code for first class letters?

To me, it looks shiny, new, and somewhat useless. Screw those DHTML menus.

The best parts of this redesign are the search bar in the top right and the bottom link area. Everything else looks like Fisher Price Theme (tm). Still, it's miles better than the old one, which looked like the chaos of a mailroom itself.

For a government website, this looks really good. As many have mentioned, incorporating red into buttons and the like would work better to draw the eye.

Dissenting opinion, it looks like it just got hacked by phishers.

And they broke all the links on their site, thanks dudes.

Where's the red? It looks cleaner but generic.

It looks basically the same as the old site, and their pricing still absolutely sucks: Too many options, all with basically the same name, and they go out of their way to conceal the cheaper shipping while showing the expensive options. Also, the country selector is broken under Chrome. A classic case of rebranding instead of addressing existing issues.

Did they hire Apple for this?

The estimated cost of the website: $30 billion USD.

[citation needed]

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