Industrial Printer UI Upgrading

In 2016, we were contacted by a globally established manufacturer of branding and information labeling solutions. Their recently released RFID tabletop and industrial printers were expected to help improve performance within the retail, food, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and automotive industries.

Customer Challenge

Tabletop printers were critically time-consuming to set up which resulted in a gradual decrease in their sales. 

Project Objective

Improve User Experience of the tabletop printer to increase the productivity of labeling operations within the logistics, retail, and manufacturing industries.

To solve the issues their end-users faced, we sent our engineer on site to investigate the printers’ user interface. First, the button operation with a monochrome screen significantly increases the time of operating. Also, there were issues regarding the interface’s consistency that led to the printers being less user-friendly. 

Therefore, we decided to develop an application for a printer with a full-fledged sensor screen, and a new User Interface for the full line of the client’s tabletop and industrial printers as well as applicator engines. To be more user friendly, the target device needed to support the following features which we also developed:

• Colorful display

• 5 types of users 

• Simple intuitive menu

• Clear icons

• Consistent templates, and terms

Next, we developed storyboards for the printers' menu workflow and screen sketches. To define the User Interface, we created a graphical design for widgets that had to be used for the interface layout and developed screen mockups. When composing the Software Specification document, we described functional and not functional requirements for the printer firmware.

General Menu Flow

A Proof of Concept (PoC) demonstration application applied Greenhill Integrity OS for firmware development. The PoC intended to make sure the selected UI framework running on the target hardware and operating system was powerful enough for development.

We also developed an HTML functional prototype for the printer user interface. This allowed for UI/UX testing and feedback by the clients marketing group. 

By the end of the project, our customer got all the documentation for its mass-scale implementation, which describes:

• Feature List with priorities

• UI Widget Design

• Wizard Storyboard

• Roles Matrix

• Functional Requirements

• UI Toolkit selection
• POC development
• Storyboarding
• GUI Widget Design
• Mockups and Prototype creation
• Wizard storyboard development
• Printer requirements definition and documentation
• UI/UX Testing
• Implementation proposal