Inquiry

Ricoh Innovations works from the premise that good research begins with a solid understanding of the setting. Therefore, Ricoh Innovations sent a small team of ethnographers to the Santa Clara University campus to speak with students about their current printing experiences, as well as their challenges with connecting to printers on campus. To collect a broad range of responses, the team also conducted paper-based and online surveys.

Of the students initially surveyed, 96 percent had laptops, and 80 percent printed either every day or a few times a week. Almost three quarters of the students said they had encountered situations where they had wished they could print but were unable to connect because they lacked the proper printer driver. Of those, one half cited difficulty connecting as the primary reason they didn't print.

This result did not surprise Ricoh's team, rather, it confirmed results from previous field research conducted on mobile workers and printing. The experience of discovering, configuring, and using printing devices for most mobile workers was an insurmountable challenge. One critical reason was that the average mobile worker didn't know about printer drivers, networks, and printer specific requirements. Typical users never had to set up printer drivers on their own systems, so the task of configuring a printer in a mobile situation often failed, or was not even attempted. We wanted to understand: why do half fail? How can we start to bridge that gap?

Innovation

Based on the initial research results, the team of engineers, ethnographers and interaction designers created a prototype called the Ricoh Mobile Printer, or, "the print anywhere driver." This prototype was uniquely suited to the issues and challenges the team had observed with Santa Clara University's students. It involved a single driver that could work on several different models and manufacturers of print devices. This driver required no knowledge of printers or drivers. Students just logged onto a website, downloaded this driver, and could then print to any of the five devices we put on campus.