Show HN: I redesigned the USPS package delivery slip

This is a thoughtful redesign. Although the organization of the redesigned form is stronger in some aspects and weaker in others (stronger in terms of how much sense it makes and the behavior flow, weaker in its visual organization), it's still a great improvement.

The key issue is that it seems busy. I think the form could sacrifice the increased font size (and generally standardize the font size and the font styles) and instead add more lines and shading that would help separate the different parts of the form. I think using lines, like the original document, is a stronger and clearer organizing tactic than font size. For example, more obvious headers (all caps? white on black background?) would help people break down the steps of what needs to be done.

But yeah, this is definitely an improvement, particularly on the UX side. Nice breakdown.

Agreed. The original slips are very confusing. Not because they're actually confusing, but because visually the firm is very busy and has all these sub points and bullets. It more so flusters the mind.

The redesign is much cleaner and easier to look at. Therefore being easier to process. This is something that is much less intimidating to look at and I would have no problem filling out while the original is daunting and seems like more of a chore, if not torture.

Because government contractors are notoriously awful at technology being that they are selected via cronyism. This would be an expensive, proprietary label system requiring special proprietary ink and labels that would likely break after being used 50 times, and require an authorized repair contractor to fix it. A relative or friend of the executive at USPS who implemented this would receive the contract and just take the money.

It would also need to interface with their daily operations "out for delivery" db which likely is also proprietary and extremely expensive to modify, and already under an existing long term licensing contract they have no intention of changing.

Disclosure: this is how it worked at Postes Canada when I once worked there. All technology was long term licensed, through crony corps I had never heard of who only seemed to exist to receive money from CPC to sell extremely expensive systems that merely passed plain text to a db.

The author has the same post office as me. I've never even managed to get something redelivered even when filling this form out, or filling it out online. That seems to be the bigger problem.

I would just make the form say, "You can get this thing at the post office tomorrow. If you don't pick it up by XXX, it will be crushed into a cube."

This is why the world thinks we need designers... In this case I think a designer is needed, the layout falls short in conventional layout terms - grids, use of white space, things just lining up properly.

Give it another go, take on board what people have said here about it looking to busy and get the form to have function and look good!

You can do the bit that some manager would hand over to a designer, that designer not necessarily as good as you at understanding the task, or the 'how it works' bit of design.