Today, La Poste Group is becoming a cross-businesses company. The group is divided in four main activities: Mailing, Express Parcel, Bank, and Post-Office Network. Facing the mails’ volume decrease and the growing competition, it has to create a new business model. The group has already started an important mutation in order to integrate the digital, green and competition revolutions, and its goal is to become the local services’ leader.

CHALLENGES

Permanently innovating, the group’s New Services Innovation and Development Management had identified potential growth levers during brainstorming sessions. They were looking for support to help them take the next step: the realization of these concepts.

This is why La Poste called on af83 to produce on a very short period, prototypes enabling the tests of generated ideas, in collaboration with the Profession and Innovation teams at La Poste.

METHODOLOGY AND DELIVERABLES

We have organized a two-days prototyping workshop, in an atypical place, conducive to creativity and exchange. The participants were divided in small groups, working on the project of their choice among 10 concepts about 5 big themes: Silver Economy, Smart Cities, Digital Confidence, Collaborative Economy and Data. Beforehand, ideation sessions enabled the identification of the main needs solved by the future service, its target users and target use cases.

We set up a participative and iterative way of working with short and time boxed sessions, with linked deliverables, so they could easily evaluate their progression. The only watchword was “doing, not talking”, to help them focus on the value production. Our UX Designers, Project Directors and Developers joined the teams to help them reaching their ambitious objectives. The teams successively focused on the three following questions: Why? How? What? This approach puts forward the need and the use, for a better product or service’s design.

After choosing a main use case, the teams worked on the use scenario, then on the first paper-prototype conception, and finally the realization of the final prototype on tablet or phone according to the project.

RESULTS

This session has been a real success: a real adhesion to the format, a rewarding collaboration in multidisciplinary teams proud to have created tangible clickable prototypes. For all the La Poste teams, these two days also were an opportunity to acquire new methodologies and to use new tools.