USPS Informed Delivery

The United States Postal Service has a service called Informed Delivery that emails you scanned images of the mail coming to your address each morning. A government agency building a better delivery notification system than most private shipping companies is both impressive and unexpected. Scans show the front of each envelope and package label. You know whether today's mail is worth checking the mailbox for or if it is just credit card offers and political flyers. Free, requiring a brief identity verification, it sends a single email by 9 AM with thumbnail images of everything headed your way. The design lesson from a public service perspective is significant. USPS already scans every piece of mail for routing purposes, so Informed Delivery repurposes existing operational data as a customer-facing feature with almost 0 additional cost. Plain interface, just a list of scanned images with dates, but the simplicity is appropriate because the user's need is purely informational. I check the email every morning and it takes about 5 seconds to decide whether to walk to the mailbox or wait until tomorrow. Package tracking through Informed Delivery is also better than I expected, consolidating tracking numbers from USPS, UPS, and FedEx into a single dashboard. It does not have the real-time map that UPS offers. Notifications when a package is marked out for delivery are accurate within an hour, which is all I really need. Over 40 million accounts have signed up for the service. That adoption rate says more about the universal anxiety of not knowing what is in your mailbox than about any marketing effort on USPS's part.