USPS Redesign
grand-army.com
grand-army.com
Not only do I think is Hoefler & Co. a terrible company under Hoefler's leadership for that unethical move, the company has refused for the longest time to support web fonts using @font-face — now they partially support it, but only using their proprietary hosting platform, which is just setting a bad precedent for the open web.
There are plenty of small foundries producing high-quality typefaces, with @font-face friendly licensing for webfonts. Can we please stop using Hoefler fonts and supporting this guy?!
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/17/5318206/hoefler-and-frere-...
For example, I run a forum with a million daily page views. If I wanted to use Gotham, I need to pay $150 for the font, and then subscribe to their cloud service and pay $450 per month for that amount of page views.
I might be willing to pay a one-time $100 fee to use one of their fonts, or a $100 per year subscription to use any of their fonts. However, $5,500 a year for my site? That's almost as much as my servers. It's a laugh, I'll stick with the well respected free web fonts.
1. streamline the process - one form to ship something, a letter, a package, whatever. one sticker goes on the package to indicate the shipping class (certified, etc). none of this a sticker here, a red stamp there, etc.
2. incentivise employees to be PRODUCTIVE. i don't know much about their existing compensation plan, but every time i go to a PO, no one seems to give a shit. i ship a lot of packages on my lunch break. the PO is PACKED at noontime... and there's one person at the desk. REALLY?
anyway, i could go on, but they have a long, long, long, way to go.
So yeah, branding isn't their problem. It's the service itself that blows.
I've shipped exotic electronics prototypes to Canada, all by myself, gettin it right the first time, about as exotic as you can get without involving ITAR, with only minimal and brief research. If you get ITAR involved, then I do feel your pain, but ITAR isn't the USPS's fault, even if they're the easiest people to lash out at.
.gov politicians disagree emphatically. Those regulations weren't made for fun. They may result in a dysfunctional system. Monopolies do not serve their customers other than incidentally.
And I really don't think the only two options the USPS has are "be a dick" or "go figure it out yourself, you lazy shit"
They feel the big brother need to authenticate the heck out of you and your money and manually handle packages all at the same time, so a transaction takes 5 minutes and you get a fabulous line that takes an entire lunch hour to navigate.
The way it should work is vaguely like the automated checkouts at my public library, one human being who does virtually nothing other than reboot machines and create new / renew cards.
So a human being does the Big Brother tracking thing to authenticate your D/L and CC once. Then for all eternity you step up to a machine, slide your DL and CC thru the reader, you slap a sticker on the package, you throw your package on a conveyor belt, all good.
I think a system redesign could get transaction times down to a fraction of a minute and reassign humans to do stuff humans are really good at, like debugging a system they're experts at, exception handling/customer complaints, all that big brother authoritarian BS that they enjoy so much, and teaching other humans, while getting humans out of the work that humans are awful at, like following brainless repetitive procedures, manual labor, and data entry.
Where do you put all this conveyor belt and vending machine junk in existing post offices? Well, if you're not going to have people standing in lines anymore, how bout putting the gear where people used to stand in line for 30 minutes at lunch hour.
Another fix would be sh!t or get off the pot WRT big brother / evil empire stuff. Either get rid of all of it which would save a lot of time, or go all in (more likely, because its more profitable for 3rd parties) which means automatic scanning of drivers licenses and CCs and fingerprints for all transactions, which sounds bad, but if automated would be a heck of a lot faster. (Edited to make it clear I think they're achieved a local maxima of wasted time WRT big brother BS, so any change would almost by definition of a local maxima, speed things up)
There is also a bigger systemic issue WRT scrapping entire parts of the system. If big business can ship whatever they want to Canada without it being inspected or (properly) taxed, or dudes in China can ship me literally anything without the customs system doing much of anything, why not just scrap them? Get rid of the whole process, customs forms and everything. Its not like anything will change other than the elimination of a huge waste of time.
Once you've attached a prepaid shipping label to a package, you can simply drop it off at any office, and they'll ship it. No personal interaction necessary. You don't even have to wait in line.
Plus, it's really every US tax payer paying for the problems...
http://money.cnn.com/2012/03/05/news/economy/postal_service_...
- Use electronic shipping whenever possible. With label sticker paper, it's less than 5 minutes for me to create, pay and print a label on usps.com and have it on the package. Then in most cases you can just drop it in the package slot at the post office or have your mail carrier pick it up, no interaction at the post office required.
- If you're making a little side money off of eBay, eBay or PayPal shipping couldn't be easier (and the price for First Class Package, if you're < 1 lb, is a third of Priority etc)
In the rare cases I have to interact with clerks - international, SCAN forms - they've been quite efficient everywhere I've been.
Basically, you can largely avoid having to ever stand in line. If you can't, I'd suggest not going in during peak times. Lines are slow because people who stand in lines largely don't know what they want and don't know how to work the post office.
I agree with jrockway that the "Knockout" font is a little hard to follow. The eagle at the end looks... cool, but unnecessarily violent :p
Is that an amateur proposal, or was this accepted by USPS, polished further and paid for? Based on the amount of text fillings, looks like the latter is true. In any way, what I see is highly impractical, and the brand book is far from complete. Here are some things I dislike about it:
-All caps. This is wrong, and it should be fairly obvious even to a child, when pointed out. Millions of people will see media based on it, and a generation will grow up, struggling to read all-caps price lists, all-caps footnotes and navigating all-caps menus on their smartphones. What's worse, is that they will subconsciously accept it as part of their lives and surroundings.
-Too much visual clutter: completely unjustified use of borders, underlines and dotted lines – also in between semantically same elements.
-What does "→" mean?
-Clickable elements are indistinguishable from statics on self-service terminals and smartphone apps. Footnotes are impractically small even for a HD screen.
Overall impression: somebody, truly oblivious of basic usability principles, thought that infographics (the Daily-Mail-grade ones) and UITableViews are cool, and built a company identity around them. And the other guys sold it.
*edit for spelling
I also like Montserrat, free typeface kind of similar to Gotham, yet kind of different.
That said, I find this font incredibly hard to read; it almost feels like it's not English, and my brain has to work extra-hard to form words from the pixels on the screen.
http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/new_reta...
WTF - these are barely differentiated and only confuse people who don't mail things often. WWSJD (Steve Jobs) - probably have a single add-on choice he'd call something like PackageKit which would be $2 and include up-to-date tracking (for buyer and seller) and proof of delivery.
nobody cares about this in this thread.
The branding, no matter how good looking it is - and it is good - must in the end enhance the product. But if the product itself is confusing, the branding and styles can only do so much. Concise product goals make the work of the designer more focused and the end result would be beautiful to use as well as look at.
Edit: It's painfully slow to load, but it seems I was right.