Packages information is logged in thick binders of paper. It is cluttered and inefficient. With the increase in e-commerce, the problem will only get worse.‍
To understand the situation, I visited several package rooms that will adopt the new system. I observed that mailroom employees record package information in a binder. If the binder gets too full, a new binder is started and the old one is stored away.
To inform residents that their packages have arrived, a slip with the package information is put into the resident’s mailbox.
With the rise of e-commerce, more packages were being delivered every day. The mailrooms were getting cluttered. There is now a higher demand for residents to pick up their packages sooner.

With the increase in e-commerce, manual information entry gets tedious and is more prone to errors.
As more people choose to do their shopping online, the number of packages that go through the mailrooms will only increase. The task of recording tracking numbers and the times they arrived into a binder and then doing it again for a package slip can get tedious. Human error is bound to happen and the chances for mistakes can only increase as time goes by.

Using paper slips to notify residents to pick up packages is slow and outdated.
Unlike notifications and information on the digital systems, paper slips cannot effectively communicate real time information. A resident would have to go to their mailboxes before they know that their packages have arrived. In addition, packages can only be picked up if they have the paper slip, meaning it is necessary for residents to take the extra step of going to their mailboxes before they can pick up their packages. Asking so much from residents makes it so that picking up packages is an errand, one that has to be planned out, and this results in procrastination.

It is hard to retrieve information from a handful of thick binders.
‍The binders of package records are kept on a shelf, in case someone ever needs to look back on them. Manually scanning through tables upon tables of numbers and letters does not sound like a fun job. In the digital age, such a task is made easy with a search function. But you can’t do that with paper. A lot can be learned from the data in the binders but since they are not appropriately compiled or organized, it sits unused on a shelf.

Design principles
Familiar:
‍The current process need to be improved, but it doesn’t mean all aspects of it were bad. The residents and mailroom employees are used to a certain process and deviating too much from it can be jarring.
Accountability:
‍The mailroom employees emphasized that their biggest problem was the sheer amount of packages being kept in the mailroom due to residents not picking them up. The designs should focus on trying to get packages out of the mailrooms as efficiently as possible, pushing residents to pick up packages as soon as possible or pushing employees to return packages back to the sender if residents do not pick up their packages.
Streamlined:
‍Whether it’s digital or paper-based, the mailroom employees’ responsibilities are pretty repetitive. It is unavoidable, but the designs should make the lives of the mailroom employees as easy as possible, allowing things such as bulk actions and incorporating tools to make data entry easier.

We scheduled meetings throughout the design phase with the mailroom employees and stakeholders to ensure the product met their needs.
We met with the mailroom employees and their supervisors regularly to ensure our product met their needs and didn’t bring up any concerns with their supervisors. We took notes as they commented on the prototypes and with each meeting, we incorporated their feedback into our designs.

We showed our more developed product to the residents to gather feedback on how we can seamlessly incorporate the new system into their daily lives.
The new system will be a direct line of contact between the mailrooms and the residents. We needed to find out what kind of notifications we should send out, whether they be push notifications, texting, emails, etc. In addition, we wanted to ensure the residents would be comfortable with this, as some people might find notifications a nuisance. We presented our designs and ideas at a resident meeting and gathered feedback.

Next steps
If the new mailroom packages system works out, the system will be used by all residential buildings throughout NYU. With this, we would need to do more research into how the system will fit into the lives of students as well. Dorms operate differently from faculty housing, which means we would need to further develop our designs to deal with this fact.