HP: Reinventing The Magic of Printing
User experience (UX) design is about much more than just creating an interface that is beautiful to look at. The best UX design allows users to intuitively grasp how something works. Every choice, from color to size to placement, can change a user’s experience from frustration into delight and help the customer get the most from their technology.
For the past ten years, J.D. Knight has worked to create user-friendly interfaces for HP’s industry-leading printers and accessories. Ten years ago, user-interfaces referred to the small electronic screens and interfaces on the printers themselves. J.D. introduced print screen animation, animated product demos, and other interface animations that not only looked good, but helped users quickly grasp how their HP products worked.
Today, the user interface has jumped from printers to smartphones. J.D. now works as part of the Global Experience Design team to create mobile experiences that delight users. One of the projects he recently worked on was the HP Smart App, which enables customers to use their smartphone to share or print documents and images from email, text messages, social media, or cloud storage services.
The Global Experience Design team uses Adobe XD CC to collaborate on the app prototypes for Apple, Windows, and Android devices. After working with many other prototyping tools, J.D. was happy to move to Adobe XD and consolidate all app prototyping in a single tool. “Adobe XD CC was looking like a one-stop shop for app prototyping and I wanted to be a part of the experience,” he says.
For J.D., the attraction to an app wasn’t just its mobility. People enjoy apps that personalize experiences and help them make the app truly their own. The HP Smart App uses a tile layout featuring colored tiles representing different functions and image tiles representing content types. J.D. used Adobe Stock to find images to fit the different content types and inspire users to make the app their own.
Users can rearrange and personalize the layout at will. They can select a favorite image from their camera roll and use it as the tile for specific types of content. If a user frequently prints photos from Facebook, they can place a tile representing Facebook front and center.
J.D. and the Global Experience Design team at HP are happy to continue providing input to the Adobe XD team so they can add features and functionality that make a difference for UX designers.
Read more about how HP is using Adobe XD.
