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Project Name   Smart Tasks

 

 

The Team & My Role

Design a new feature that allows users to create automated tasks in the HP Smart app

1 Marketing Lead, an in-house design researcher & moderator and myself, Interaction Designer.

The Challenge

Our product team needed to update the printing app, HP Smart, to appeal to and support both our fun-loving, creative consumers as well as our efficiency-minded business customers. This project introduced exciting new design challenges as our consumer team would be collaborating with our business counterparts. Beyond the visual design updates like a more refined color palette and less playful iconography, we would have to address one of the business customers’ top concerns: productivity.

“Make the HP Smart app experience more valuable to business customers without alienating our consumer base.”

The Process

Understand the user

In order to begin this project, we needed to understand exactly what productivity meant to our business customers, so I worked with my marketing partner to conduct a high-level, usertesting.com study to more closely investigate their needs. We asked small business owners who owned printers about their priorities, concerns, daily life, and printing behavior. We learned that many of our business customers were administrators and small business owners who spent large portions of their day filing and organizing. 

Evaluate and audit the current experience

I conducted a deep dive into the Smart app envisioning how a feature like this would fit into our existing product. I mapped out the taps it took to complete each of those jobs using the Smart app: seventeen taps in total. Combining these into a wizard-type flow was easy, but our customers need it to be intuitive and far fewer than seventeen taps.

“What we identified was a need for a feature that would ease the burden of doing repetitive tasks such as emailing, scanning, signing, printing, digitizing, and filing.”
“Ultimately, the challenge was to cut down the number of taps it took to scan, print, save and send a job and then also, save those actions as one task for future use.”

Design-relevant solutions

After auditing the current experience, I conducted a competitive analysis to investigate relevant solutions that were available on the market. At the time, there was a surge in features like shortcuts and routines that were trending across companies like Apple and Amazon (Alexa Routines), so there were plenty of approaches to examine. Considering both the value and the gaps in experiences that were currently being offered, I developed a few different approaches that might work for our product. 

Concept 1: Custom templates—This approach allowed a user to either select a template based on a common scenario or create one from scratch. 

Concept 2: Turn on tasks—With this approach, the user has the ability to see all of their options up front and decide what they need.