UPSers: fourteen years on the portal UPS drivers and package handlers check from their phones

UPSers is where UPS employees check their paycheck, benefits, HR information and company news. In the fall of 2018 its audience was 483,760 employees and about 130,000 peak seasonal workers, and 89% of them worked in operations: package handlers, drivers, part-time supervisors (UPS audience figures, September 2018).

Most of those people have no desktop computer at work and often no company email address. By October 2018, 44% of visits came from phones.

And they do not all read English. UPS publishes in 17 languages, through more than 200 authors around the world, and a message that matters to one center, one union local or one country means nothing to the next.

2009–2015: Keeping the portal findable, and running

Our first work on UPSers, in 2009–2010, tuned its search and redesigned its interior pages, site map and content strategy. From 2011 we supported it under yearly agreements, and from 2013 we connected it to UPS’s translation provider, so an author sends a draft out for translation and gets it back for review before it is published. In 2015 we moved the portal to WebSphere Portal and Web Content Manager 8.5; it went live on May 31, 2015.

2015–2018: One responsive portal instead of a separate mobile site

The old mobile site showed only headlines and a few resources, and did not load on some phones. UPS’s 2015 redesign, researched and first designed by another firm, replaced it; we designed the remaining pages in the new design language, built the responsive theme and ran the site. Authors target each item by language, region, job function and level, so every employee sees corporate, regional and local news on one page, from any device.

Messages from their own center

On that platform we built what employees and their managers asked for: Center Alerts, so a center team can tell its own employees about start times or project needs on their home page, matched by center number; a guided tour that shows new hires where to find their paycheck and time card, “so that they can get back to the job they were hired for”; union benefit links for more than 100 union locals; and one home-page carousel that carries every translation.

2018–2019: Asking 611 employees what comes next

UPS asked us to set a new vision for UPSers, for new hires, employees and retirees. We surveyed 421 employees in the US and 190 more in their own languages abroad, ran a card sort with 217 people, interviewed content authors, tested wireframes and inventoried 9,215 content items. Paycheck, news, benefits, HR and time cards were what people came for; search and navigation were what they wanted fixed. We delivered an information architecture, desktop and mobile prototypes, a governance framework and a roadmap, signed off in April 2019, and advised UPS on its enterprise employee portal in 2019–2020.

For fourteen years, a UPS employee opening UPSers, often on a phone, found news for their center, their region, their job and their language, in one of 17 languages, and new hires were shown straight to their paycheck. In 2018 its audience was more than 600,000 employees and peak seasonal workers (UPS figures).

Our part: the 2009–2010 search and page redesign, the 2015 platform upgrade and responsive build, the translation workflow, the features built on top, fourteen years of support, and the 2019 research and design for what comes next. UPS’s 2015 design research was another firm’s, and we do not claim it; the 2019 design was a vision and prototype, and we do not claim it was built.