Innovation

A hybrid household printer for a new normal

While working remotely, an HP design team used their own experiences to design a printer ideal for home and work.

By Suchi Rudra — April 26, 2022

What happens when you’re designing a new home office printer — from your home office? When HP sent employees home to work remotely as COVID-19 took hold in spring 2020, systems engineer Rosella Patenio and her team had just begun the design process on the new HP ENVY Inspire printer, which would include features and upgrades for home office needs.

Suddenly, and for the first time, the design team found themselves in the shoes of the consumers for whom they were developing the product — stuck at home with their families, and competing for space, bandwidth, and privacy as everyone tried to get through a virtual workday and school day at the same time — and sometimes in the same room.

Courtesy of HP

The HP ENVY Inspire printer was designed to align with the new hybrid work demands.

They quickly uncovered insights and opportunities they may not have seen in the lab. For example, Patenio had brought home a special lamp from the office that helped her simulate the lighting conditions in the HP lab to properly analyze photo quality on printouts. But as she collaborated with her team via Zoom calls and email, she realized that she had something even better. Standing beside a window to view a printout in natural light, she was viewing photos just as any customer might — an experience that gave her real-world insight into how to make improvements. “That's not an experience we usually have in the office setting,” she says.

Working from home, Rosella Patenio uses a high resolution microscope for page attributes analysis and the i1iSis Spectrophotometer for color measurement.

Meanwhile Rowdy Webb, a project manager on the HP ENVY Inspire team, like many of his teammates, brought home a prototype of the printer. As his family used it like any consumer would, they provided insights he could bring to the product’s development. “My daughter is in 5th grade, and she really took to printing photos on it and was happy to test out some of the new features,” he says. “It was cool to see what she decided to print and how she used it.”

As the team navigated all the challenges brought on by that first year of the pandemic, the aptly named HP ENVY Inspire became a focal point — sparking their creativity, energizing their collaboration, and giving them a challenge that felt inspiring during an unprecedented time.

“It helped boost my morale that we were doing something useful,” Webb says.

What they came up with strikes the “perfect balance” between an office printer and a casual home printer according to one review, and has also been called a “fantastic home office tool.”

Here are a few ways the team’s personal experiences led to HP ENVY Inspire features designed for a new normal.

Quiet Mode becomes crucial

Although Quiet Mode already existed on HP printers, the HP ENVY Inspire team realized the feature had become a top priority for families.

“With more family members at home using the printer and working on their computers during the day, what we found is that other people may be using the printer while you’re trying to have a serious conversation on Zoom,” says Jeff Walter, director of strategy and product marketing at HP.

Melissa Webb

Rowdy Webb working on the HP ENVY Inspire project at home during the COVID-19 lockdown.

In response, the team updated the Quiet Mode feature in a few ways — creating the ability to switch Quiet Mode on in the middle of a print job, placing a Quiet Mode icon on the main home screen so people can find it more easily, and allowing users to schedule Quiet Mode ahead of time to prevent interruptions during important calls or meetings.

Remote-learning ready

When schools shifted to distance learning, many schools handed out Chromebooks for students to take home. The team realized it was important for the HP ENVY Inspire printer to be “Works With Chromebook” certified, so parents could rest assured that it would be easy for their kids to use without requiring tech support. The HP ENVY Inspire team spent a lot of time working with a team at Google to ensure that kids could use the printer — to connect, print, and scan — seamlessly with a Google Chromebook.

Another kid-friendly feature is the ability to create shortcuts for things you need to do on a semi-regular basis. “You can set a shortcut up on your phone, and then it automatically transfers to the computer and can be used very easily,” says Walter. “If a kid needed to scan their homework to email their teacher — which was a pretty normal thing that a lot of kids were doing for a while — you could create a one-button shortcut. Your child could then walk up and put the homework on the printer, hit one button, and boom, it scans right to their teacher.”

For the first time, the design team found themselves in the shoes of the consumers for whom they were developing the product — stuck at home with their families, and competing for space, bandwidth, and privacy.

Another new feature that’s useful for kids and parents printing from different rooms in the house: a stack height sensor that detects how much paper is still available in the printer, a feature leveraged from HP Officejet printers.

“You want it to work for an office, and you want it to work for the kids,” says Lorri Golob, program manager for the HP ENVY Inspire. “We have large capacity trays to accommodate that workhorse office environment, but we also have a photo tray on board so you can do your creative projects with your kids or print photos.”

Rowdy Webb

Webb's daughter, Ella, printed photos and inspirational messages to hang in her bedroom with the HP ENVY Inspire printer.

Poised for a post-pandemic photo revival

Keeping the printer in tune with how people want to view and share their photos meant updating printout size options to reflect the popular square format of Instagram and the panoramic or landscape format that most smartphones are now capable of capturing with wide angle shots.

However, the design team wasn’t just focused on keeping the printer current — they also had their eyes on the future. While the HP ENVY Inspire was developed in the midst of the pandemic lockdown, the team also tried to maintain an optimistic outlook and consider consumer needs in a post-pandemic future. What kind of a printer would be needed when remote working and remote learning were integrated into people’s everyday lives, with hybrid work or occasional stints with at-home learning?

“We were thinking about the fact that when the pandemic came to an end, people would get out and about in droves, make up for lost time, travel, go to events, celebrate with friends, go to birthdays, and have the wedding celebrations that were on hold,” says Walter. “All of those things drive the taking of photographs, so we spent a bunch of time thinking about how can we amp up the photo capabilities in the printer.”

The team, in collaboration with their HP Smart app team colleagues, added custom, two-sided photo printing capabilities, with the back of the photo automatically including the date and location — all with a couple clicks.

“One of my coworkers was playing with this feature and printed me out a photo and sent it to me as a postcard during the lockdown,” Golob says. “When we’re all stuck at home, it’s kind of fun to take a picture and send it to somebody [through the mail]. It just kind of opens the world up for creativity.”

The team also greatly enhanced the printer’s photo quality for richer, more vibrant printed photos that look more like what you see on your smartphone screen and better preserve the new memories people will be making.

“This printer makes it easy for us to print our favorite moments and use photos for school activities instead of just keeping them on my phone,” Patenio says. “They look amazing, and that just makes us want to print more.”

Tags: Consumer Printing / Print / Home / Printers / Mobile Computing / Work-life / Hybrid Work
Posted In: Innovation

Innovation

A hybrid household printer for a new normal

Remote-learning ready

Poised for a post-pandemic photo revival

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