HP Indigo requested a news platform to centralize company updates across various topics, including service, maintenance, new products, and events. The goal was to develop a well-defined MVP for initial testing, allowing flexibility within certain constraints:
Integration with PrintOS: The platform would be part of PrintOS, HP’s internal system for printer owners. TENA has collaborated with HP Indigo and HP Global for over a decade, shaping their interfaces from the first generation of touch screens to cloud-based PrintOS applications.
ServiceNow Compatibility: The solution needed to align with the ServiceNow environment to ensure seamless integration.
Handling Legacy Constraints: Due to interoperability challenges between new and legacy systems within PrintOS, some news files wouldn’t support direct embedding. In these cases, the platform had to replicate an email-style format, displaying a main message with an attached PDF when needed.
Role:
User Research, Interaction, Visual design, Prototyping & Testing
Industry:
Web news portal
Duration:
2020 - 2022
Overview
I joined TENA Studio as a Product Designer a month before the project started. As part of the UX/UI team, I participated in research, wireframing, prototyping, UI design, and developer handoff.
Challenges
User Needs: Floor managers handle various updates—software, maintenance, schedules, regulations—that need to be streamlined into one organized platform.
Data Complexity: HP’s extensive printer lineup includes multiple models, versions, and extensions, requiring a well-structured hierarchy to manage large volumes of information efficiently.
My Approach
We conducted research using several methods:
Technical News Platform Analysis – Studied different structures to define data organization on the main news page.
Existing Information Review – Assessed how updates were currently delivered and their frequency.
User Definition – Identified the range of end-users.
ServiceNow Training – Understood system constraints and limitations.
Key Insights
Lack of Two-Way Communication: Most news platforms function as one-way channels, with no way for users to respond or interact.
Floor Manager’s Role: Floor managers receive updates but lack a built-in way to relay them to factory workers.
Content Categorization: Information was divided into four groups—Product News, Technical News, Reports, and Enrichment Content.
Content Formats: Updates arrived as text, PDFs, videos, and images, requiring clear indicators for format, information type, and related machine when applicable.
Conclusion
The new platform launched successfully with positive feedback from the users.
Working on an interface that is a part of a bigger operating system has a lot of constraints. Both the UI and UX has to be consistent with other parts of the system to create seamless navigation through the platform. The challenge was fun to take part in and I had a chance to explore my ideas in different frames of constraints which I believe leads to greater creativity.
While designing a new platform within a bigger system, there are some limitations related to phases of development. Constrains like file formats that can not change or be implemented seamlessly were a big challenge which we had to find our path in to come up with a reasonable solution.
Management systems such as Service Now have their limitations. We had to juggle between designing with system limitations and highly trained developers that can make magic. This was a fun experience of stretching the frame of limitations together.