Understanding how printers are used at Brown University
Besides classes, social life, and advancing their careers, students at Brown University must also master how to use the printers. It is generally accepted that the printing system is confusing, especially to new users, but more research is necessary to directly identify and address the problems that makes printing so hard.
Perform user research on the printers and summarize the interactions using personas and storyboarding.
In order to get a better idea of how people print at Brown using the printing service, I observed and interviewed three people in the Sciences Library basement who were printing papers out.
All three observed users swiped their cards at the printing station. The swipe changed the screen to the printing queue page. The amount of time between this page and the completion of printing varied between about 20 seconds to 5 minutes. One user brought her computer to the printer and appeared to be modifying a document before printing her paper. Another person swiped into the computer then walked back to his laptop at his desk. The queue page had several files on it.
Two provisional personas were created using the observations and responses recorded from users.
Hector is a junior at Brown. He has class in 30 minutes and needs to print his draft for review. In his haste, Hector forgets to format his pages perfectly before uploading them. He is forced to fix the mistakes from his laptop and reupload everything instead of being able to do so from the interface. Hector represents the cohort of users that are familiar with using the printers at Brown but also face the time challenges that university has. His forgetfulness could stem from stress of finals, fatigue, or social pressures, which are all highly relevant issues to Brown students.
Nate is a new student and has never used the printer at Brown before. He struggles with the unfamiliar process of queuing a printing job from the computer. Nate doesn't know where he can print his papers around campus, either. His limited knowledge of the interface slows down how fast he's able to print, which could be problematic for close deadlines. Nate is representative of new users, which is a large proportion of the user base since nearly 1600 freshman learn to use the printers each year. As a new user, Nate's biggest problem is unfamiliarity; printing papers takes at least a few times to get used to it, and some people will need help with their first time printing.
The storyboard takes one of the personas I created and places them in a scenario that exemplifies how that persona would interact with the printer. This is helpful for thinking about what issues certain groups might face when using the printer.
Hurried Hector
