USPS – World’s Best Mail Service Fails on Mobile Website

I don’t know about you, but I am a big fan of the US Postal Service.

Rain, snow or sleet – no problem. They will get that precious eBay purchase into your anxious hands whether you are chilling in farthest reaches of the Iowa farmlands or hanging with your homies in your Manhattan penthouse suite.

There’s a reason Amazon has chosen to partner with your local mail carrier. They deliver 40% of the world’s mail. Yes, that does include those throwaway flyers from RiteAid and CVS.) And it’s all tracked!

In fact, believe it or not, the USPS is ranked number one in the world.

Mobile Website Failure?

So you can imagine my surprise when I grabbed my phone to check the ETA of business-critical mail and saw the USPS web page for package tracking. Yikes, dark ages anyone? The page offers a seriously flawed mobile display, which is distinctly annoying if you are trying to stay on top of a delivery. (See test results for this mobile website page on 14 leading mobile devices.)

The post office has simply failed to offer a mobile-friendly web page. On this page and others, they neglected to implement mobile responsive web design and instead reproduce the entire full-blown website page on your smartphone’s mini screen. All this makes it super difficult to punch in my tracking numbers while zooming in and dragging the page for legibility.

This kind of mobile-unfriendly performance is enough to tarnish the reputation of any business, whether it’s your local plumber or our $67-billion mail delivery service. As every marketing manager and web developer knows, your website updates need to be tested, QA-ed, and tested again on real mobile devices, not mere emulators, to ensure easy, seamless usability. That’s why we created Mobilizer, the online mobile testing lab.

The USPS has so much to boast about, including plenty of state-of-the art automation and tracking technology, and it’s rightly proud of its sterling delivery performance. It’s a shame that the post office can’t master that absolutely obligatory, modern channel for customer communication: a decent mobile-friendly website. C’mon America, we can do better than that!