Nova Post Mobile App

Project Overview

Context

Nova Post is the leading logistics corporation in Ukraine. The mobile app serves over 10 million private customers, enabling them to track, pay for, and receive parcels (B2C), as well as send items (C2C) from addresses, post offices, and automated lockers (postomats).

When I joined the team, the new mobile application had just been launched as a Beta MVP.

Timeline: February 2024 – June 2025

Goals

Drive User Acquisition: Transition users from the legacy application, which had been on the market for 10 years, to the brand-new platform.
Product Maturation: Elevate MVP functionality to a feature-rich product level capable of outperforming the legacy app.
Data-Driven Evolution: Establish a continuous user feedback loop to guide business solutions and ensure new features align with both business goals and market dynamics.

Role

As the Design Team Lead, I operated across three areas:

Leadership & Strategy: Managing the design team, resource planning, and elevating the end-to-end product design process.
Design Governance: Conceptualizing core solutions and user flows, and supervising all design artifacts (wireframes, hand-off layouts, and documentation) to ensure consistency and high quality across the product interface, balancing UI excellence and UX efficiency.
Stakeholder Management: Collaborated with legacy and beta app users, business leads, and tech teams to identify the best ways to meet customer needs. I ensured every design solution was a strategic balance between aesthetic elegance, technical feasibility, and business goals.

Challenges

Process Fragmentation: When I joined, a significant disconnect existed between the design, business, and development teams, leading to misalignment in feature implementation.
Intuition-Based Decisions: The product lacked a systematic feedback loop, resulting in design decisions driven by assumptions rather than verified user insights and actual customer pain points.
Legacy Resistance: Transitioning 10 million users from a stable, decade-old app required overcoming deep-rooted user habits and high expectations for the new MVP.

Impact

User Satisfaction: App rating increased to 4.8.
Rapid Growth: The user base for the new app grew 3x within 1.5 years.
Feature Parity & Beyond: Successfully transitioned all valuable legacy functionality to the new app and introduced advanced new features.
Global Scalability: Re-engineered the app architecture and UI logic to support international expansion and localization, ensuring high accessibility and scalability for diverse markets and complex user flows.

Execution Process

1. Research & User Insights

Feedback Clustering: Analyzed legacy data from post-service forms, support centers, and beta-user communities to identify recurring pain points.
Contextual Research: Conducted field studies at parcel lockers and post offices to capture real-world user behavior.
Validation: Launched remote and lab-based usability studies to test hypotheses.
Expert Audit: Performed a comprehensive UI/UX evaluation based on revealed customer needs.

2. Strategic Planning

Resource Management: Balanced in-house and external design resources for optimal delivery.
Goal Setting: Established KPIs and success metrics, including regular CSI (Customer Satisfaction Index) tracking.
Infrastructure: Refined the design process and updated the design system and design artifacts to ensure scalability and consistency.

3. Cross-functional Alignment

Design-to-Dev Sync: Established direct collaboration channels and documentation standards for seamless handoffs.
Shared Empathy: Involved engineering and managing teams in user sessions to build a deeper understanding of customer problems.
Strategic Ideation: Facilitated workshops with top-level stakeholders to align design solutions with business goals.

4. Validation & Iteration

Iterative Prototyping: Developed interactive flows to validate the most effective UX patterns.
Optimization: Conducted A/B testing on micro-interactions and UI changes to drive conversion and usability.

5. Delivery

High-Fidelity Handoff: Delivered production-ready, functional UI screens alongside comprehensive documentation to ensure precision.
Cross-Team Synchronization: Collaborated with engineering, business analysis, and QA teams to address edge cases and ensure content-first, user-centric solutions.
System Maintenance: Continuously updated the design system and streamlined asset export processes to maximize handoff efficiency.

6. Continuous Improvement

Systematic Research: Implemented regular CSI polls and quarterly SUM (Single Usability Metric) studies to track the quality of core features (Shipping & Receiving).
Scalable Insights: In collaboration with the product team, built a framework for AI-driven analysis of customer support feedback.
Continuous Discovery: Integrated CJM and ideation workshops as a mandatory step for every new feature.
Performance Tracking: Set up behavioral analytics (engagement rates, service funnels) to identify further optimization points.

Lessons Learned

Shared Empathy as a Bridge: Involving developers and managers directly in user research sessions and ideation workshops is the fastest way to build empathy, eliminate information loss and foster a culture of shared product ownership.
Data over Opinions: Establishing a transparent framework for customer feedback analysis transforms subjective stakeholder debates into objective, data-driven product discussions.
Consistency Scales Growth: A robust design system and toolstack are not just "UI helpers" but critical business infrastructure that directly accelerates global scalability and localization.

Selected Case Studies