Years of friction. One clean tool.

FedEx’s address book is one of the most-used tools in their shipping ecosystem, relied on by enterprise shippers managing thousands of contacts. It hadn’t been redesigned in years and the problems had compounded. I led the usability research that surfaced what was actually broken — and the redesign that followed.

senior ux designer usability research interaction design functional alignment 2022 at tank design

FedEx Address Book redesign showing contact list, import flow, and address form across multiple screen states

challenge

The legacy address book had known usability issues, but no one had a clear picture of how they connected or which users were most affected. Before designing a solution, we had to understand the real scope of the problem.

That meant starting with research, not assumptions. The same tool serves an enterprise shipper with thousands of contacts and a retail user shipping twice a year.

Legacy FedEx Address Book with annotated usability issues including dated layout and unhelpful errors — legacy experience — years of complexity without a cohesive redesign

Affinity mapping board grouping interview observations into research themes for FedEx Address Book — affinity mapping — clustering observations into the five themes that drove the design

transformation

Research surfaced five clear patterns in how users were struggling. Those patterns became the organizing logic for the redesign — modernize, clarify, anticipate, simplify, flex.

The work focused on reducing steps for the most common tasks while keeping edge cases reachable. Address entry is a small interaction with high frequency. The details matter more than they look like they should.