Design Fail: Printer Drivers

Posted on Feb 1, 2009 in Design, IT | 1 comment

Disclaimer: I don’t really like printers. Printing to me is the purvey of big machines with trained professionals who know about dot gain, ink spread, parent sheets, four-color process and other printer terms. I’m no fan of the little ink-jets that cost $99 to buy but $75 to replace the ink in every three months.

But regular printers do have a place, especially in an office setting. Unfortunately, the horribly designed interfaces for most print dialogs are a large part of why many office workers pull their hair out when they have to print: “Why is this double-sided!?” or “My god, why won’t it print DOUBLE SIDED!”

Case in point: the tab order in this dialog box. It’s bad enough that you have to enter a second dialog just to accomplish something simple like printer your job duplex (double-sided). Adding insult to injury: once you’re there, this dialog confusingly presents the “Finishing” tab first (I’ve circled it in red), yet the “Basics” tab (circled in green)–containing the options most users would need–is last.

Perhaps I’m not as worked up as this guy is about the interface issues that abound in Adobe’s Creative Suite 4, but it does bother me. Printing is a very (too?) common for most computer users. So the interface to control those printers should be excellent. Some of you may argue, “this looks like a dialog for a fancy office laser printer. Consumer printer drivers are better.” Well, that may be. But from an IT standpoint, poorly-designed interfaces for commonly-used functions like printing can be very costly. For example, users might waste twice as much paper as necessary because setting up duplex printing is too hard. Or they have to call the help desk or ask their colleagues for help. These may not seem like much, but repeated multiple times a day across an enterprise can add up.

So, printer vendors: please pay a little more attention to your interfaces. People notice.

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