Design process
From Printing
Contents |
Exploring the configurations matrix
Exploring the UI features for each printer cluster
Personal Laser
We selected Personal Laser as the first printer cluster to get a detailed design treatment. This meant looking carefully at the UI Interface features, and questioning and rethinking every aspect of their interation. This cluster was selected because it is actually rather average, enabling us to get to grips with fundamental issues, but fundamentals of an unremarkable nature. Other printer clusters will share many of the UI features of this printer one, but they will not be exactly the same, having additional or fewer features, different technologies, varying market and user groups, etc.
Rethinking printer dialogue controls
Our approach was to question. We brainstormed considering closely the following issues:
- Terminologies- Is the current terminology from a technical viewpoint, one which does not resonate with the task the user wishes to perform?
- Diagrams and Icons- do these actually help, or are they simply decorative?
- Brevity- Is this the shortest, directest, most compact and clearest way this can possibly be made?
Design sketches made while rethinking the controls for the Personal Laser printer UI
Poster print and image orientation controls
Duplexing -print on both sides-two sided printing
Duplexing -print on both sides-two sided printing
Poster print and image orientation controls
Paper prototyping
We took the decisions and discoveries we had made during the sketching and brainstorming sessions, and drew up a definitive list of the controls we needed, complete with pencil sketches. It now remained for these controls to be given a definitive order. This order needed to be logical, intuitively right, and driven by the user's ultimate goal; to get their print out, and in the way they envisaged it. The rationale behind the need for one definitive list of controls, and exactly how it will be implemented in context, is available in peter’s blog.
To achieve this we approached the list by thinking of it as a print narrative, the story of how one approaches printing a document. However, we also had to bear in mind that this list would never be read in such a way. Although it would always be seen in order, any combination of controls could theoretically be displayed together, as this would depend on the tag selected.
We also need to arrange the controls into sections, but sections which once again were logically driven by the users goal- get their data on paper- rather than on technological grounds, or by numerical convenience. We would look at these sections loosely as about the information (data), transformation-transforming the information into the image to be printed,the paper- about the physical print to come out of the printer. And to do this we would need flexibility in how we could look at each control as a separate entity.
The obvious solution was to chop up our sketch into separate, individual control-sized chunks. We could move these around at will, testing out our ideas for the order of the controls, seeing how they worked together and testing if our theories of how to order them, stacked up in reality.
The first attempt resulted in a long list, divided into sections. This wasn't as illuminating as we thought it was going to be. Our print narrative was not a straight forward linear narrative after all.
