Success Stories ‘07: OpenPrinting
Published on September 30th, 2007 by Ellen ReitmayrSummary
The Open Printing project is a workgroup of the Free Standards Group and shapes the use experience of printing on Linux.
The project offered the opportunity to work as an Associate Interaction Architect, and to shape the printing experience on Linux. Activities focussed on creating the concept and UI sketches of a generic print dialog that will go into usability testing, and working on UI specification.
Peter Sikking, project lead
“The openPrinting ’season of usability’ project achieved the
goals of doing the necessary groundwork and preparing first
version interaction designs. In general, the project ensured that
on a weekly basis progress was made by the openPrinting usability
and interaction team.”
About
Project: OpenPrinting.
The Open Printing project is a workgroup of the Free Standards Group and shapes the use experience of printing on Linux.
Student Intern: Andrea Alessandrini, Italy.
Interaction Mentor: Peter Sikking, Germany.
Peter Sikking is principal interaction architect at m+mi works.
Project Work
Designing a print dialog poses great challenges like dealing with 5,000,000 use cases and handling the inconsistency of print parameters among different printer vendors.
During a meeting in Siena, the team decided to “eliminate the print dialog as we know it” and give the users the opportunity to put together their own personal print dialog.
Peter Sikking, the interaction mentor, described the idea in his blog:
“The problem with print dialogs today is that 40–80 printing parameters are categorised into six or more ‘tabs’, to cut down the shear mass of them for presentation. Putting them all on one panel would be a horrible mess. [..] Instead of sorting printing parameters into categories, we could apply tags to each parameter and have users select some tags to build their own dialog.”
Based on this idea, Andrea and Peter started to create paper mockups visualising a generic print dialog that opened up new dimensions for talking about printing parameters, e.g. “need speed?”, “paper saving”, “precision” or “paper orientation”.
Downloads and Links
Links
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