Issue #0505/1 - A recent opportunity to conduct an informal focus group produced a wealth of opinion and comment on the way that hard copy is approached by users, their attitudes toward print, and some perceptions on needs, together with frustrations and situations that significantly affect costs or operational efficiency.
Consisting of six individuals, the focus group comprised four members of staff from an 1,100-pupil secondary school: the bursar; one member of the senior leadership team; and two heads of department, one of whom is head of IT – plus a senior vice president from the banking sector and one product certification manager from a government research establishment.
All have intense hard copy needs and experience of user behaviour in their own spheres. The only brief to the discussion was:
- attitudes towards hard copy
- user behaviour
- personal needs
We begin with some of the more basic aspects of hard copy, based around the ‘need to read’.
Paper-based information communication is a basic need and has been for thousands of years. Even when mankind lived in caves, he felt a need to communicate ideas in graphical form on a hard copy media – the wall of the cave.
Throughout the centuries this need has been reinforced and reinforced as the volume of communication has increased together with its importance and influence. Caxton’s invention of the printing press and the production of the Gutenberg Bible are historic landmarks in the progress of information communication. Computers, computing power and their associated infrastructures have expanded the realm of information communication beyond anything that most people could have imagined even 25 years ago, let alone 100 years ago.
How bizarre is it then that the humble piece of paper still holds such power that the majority of individuals still rely on it for even the most basic of written communication?
- Communication that could be read easily off a computer screen
- Communication that is transmitted electronically without any recourse to paper
- Communication that frequently doesn’t survive on paper for much more than a brief instant
- Communication that is actually committed to the digital world for long-term storage
Although an obvious suggestion would be that the preference to read off paper is a generational feature, as today’s older generation have been used to either typing onto paper or writing with paper and pen, struggle to come to terms with new ways of doing things, evidence would suggest that this is not the case. People of all ages print to review text while people of all ages are happy to read off-screen.
On balance, it would appear that more people prefer to read from paper than from screen, considering it to be the more reliable method. There is a feeing that there could almost be a condition one might refer to as ‘screen dyslexia’ where words jump around the screen, making reading difficult.
This can be illustrated in the use of the almost universal ‘on-line manual’, shipped with most pieces of hardware and software. One would assume that the obvious solution for finding information in an on-line manual would be to use the computer’s advanced search facilities and then read that information briefly on-screen. But, apparently many users will prefer to print the relevant page, or chapter, having located the required section, so that the information can be fully absorbed and instructions followed. The reason given is that the screen doesn’t appear as friendly a medium as familiar paper.
One factor that would appear to be generational, however, is the inability of the younger generation to check their work at all. This is particularly noted in schools, where the red wavy underlining of the Microsoft Office products appears to hold absolutely no significance to the individuals at all – or they are incapable of selecting the correct spelling from the list they are presented with. Work is printed and handed in to teachers without even correcting the errors the software is flagging, let alone making any attempt to locate and correct other errors.
Although the newly evolving language of ‘texting’ has been credited with the emergence of new linguistic skills, there is no doubt that it is responsible for beginning the process of killing off linguistic accuracy. It is changing the use of language forever. While the computer makes it easier, faster, and perhaps more satisfying, for individuals to present their thoughts on paper, a parallel evolution is reducing standards.
Moving to some more general comments made, when asked to think about typical practises with hard copy, these managers indicated a strong feeling that the vast majority of users are very lazy in the way they approach their hard copy needs.
For instance, users are specifically criticised for putting no thought into what they are doing. In particular, they will not change print formats to best reflect the specific characteristics of the print job or the logic of the situation (e.g. draft against final).
By the same token goes the criticism that users will not change printers when required. This relates most closely with the use of colour printers. Setting aside the fact that a few colour printers now offer mono printing at costs lower than mono printers (a fact that few users are aware of), users still print all jobs to colour printers despite the cost incurred.
Apart from the fact that laziness is a contributing factor, this can only indicate that users are just not fully aware of the costs involved in printing.
Quite clearly, a large majority of print jobs could be printed in duplex so that paper usage is minimised, while many jobs could also be printed with more than one page’s-worth of information to each side of paper (n-up printing). These two combined can not only reduce paper costs but also toner costs and have an additional knock-on effect in terms of long-term maintenance and replacement. It could be considered to be the equivalent of travelling two miles for every mile’s-worth of fuel, tyres and engine wear and tear in a car. How many of us would jump at that opportunity if it were presented to us?
Following on with the theme of laziness, comment has been made previously in TCPglobal that a common failing amongst users is the willingness to walk to a printer not located by their desk to collect a print job. Essentially, the closer the printer, the more willing they are to use it.
Interestingly, because of historical factors, we are all familiar with the need to walk to a copier, so why not a printer? But, because of the way printer hardware costs have eroded over the years, we’ve become used to the availability of a personal printer that we are very reluctant to give it up. Therefore, while there is a general expectation to need to walk to a copier, because of the expense, there is no expectation of needing to walk to a printer.
This is all tied in with the ‘instant’ world we live in. Expectations are high that everything we want will be available to us immediately – and not just food. It even helps to explain our growing fascination with debt. We would rather land ourselves with a huge credit card bill that will take months or years to pay off, or a personal loan over five or ten years, than to set money aside in advance for the purchase we desire. What it doesn’t mean is that what we want is what is best for us!
Talking of an instant world – there could be prints made that actually don’t need to be made. Here I am referring to proof prints. Of course it is necessary for some types of output to be printed initially as a proof before committing to the final print and of course this proofing process must include colour printing for colour matching purposes, as appropriate.
However, unnecessary proofs are printed as individuals desire to see their work at an early stage when on-screen viewing is more than adequate. In addition, prints that should constitute the final copy often turn out to be a proof, or a first proof rather than a final proof, because the user has not checked the document adequately on screen before pressing print. Result – wasted page(s), all of which increases costs.
Several of these items mentioned could be described as frustrations for management. So, lets have a look at some specific frustrations mentioned by the group.
Firstly, to pick up on the laziness factor again, this very definitely extends to the general oversight of printers, in particular those that are shared. One distinct tendency of users is to avoid any interaction at all with the machine if it can be helped. This includes changing toners, filling paper trays, clearing paper jams (unless this has to be undertaken by a technician) and especially turning the printer off at night – hence many workgroup printers are just left running overnight and over weekends.
In fact, many users would prefer to redirect their print job rather than sort out a fault on their normal printer. This encounters additional costs in terms of time to resend the job, time to walk to the alternative printer and additional time lost to productivity on the machine that developed the fault. In all probability, the user in question will not even bother to inform the IT department of the fact that intervention is required – unless there is no alternative device on offer to take the print job, in which case vehement complaints are made to IT personnel.
Typically, one person in each workgroup will adopt the status of ‘printer expert’, either because he is the only individual to have a small interest in the technological side of the operation or simply by default because he is the nearest user to it.
This person has the best view of the reliability of the machine in question. Whatever the historical belief that copiers are less reliable than printers, there is a clear tendency to view even printers as unreliable – especially in the realm of paper jams – and that colour printers are worse than mono. Whenever a technician’s input is required, the first assumption is that the device is unreliable.
One reason that colour printers are perceived to be more unreliable is that unreliability is accentuated by the nature of print jobs being pushed through those printers. Colour print jobs are typically time-critical, mission-critical or customer-critical and may have a distinct seasonality to them, resulting in workflow pressures.
As use of IT pervades the workplace, new implementations may cause anomalies in early stages of transition. A particular casualty can be duplication of work and excessive print volumes.
For instance, in the school in question, some government submissions are newly handled by the completion of on-line forms. However, because an audit trail is required and a handwritten signature has to be included on every completed form, each and every form has to be printed, signed and posted to the government agency.
Entirely unnecessary and wasteful, this situation, and its associated costs (handling, printing, envelopes and postage), could simply be avoided by placing the on-line submission module of the application on a secure server with secure user identifiers as a digital signature. If even a self-assessment tax form can be completed and submitted on-line then surely a form as simple as an educational return could be?
Company staff are very likely to be happier undertaking their own hard copy requirements than sending print and copy jobs off to a central print/copy/reprographics department. There is always the feeling that ‘hands on’ is more reliable and satisfactory as the document owner can exert a greater level of control over the job in hand.
Particular frustrations here revolve around inadequate care taken in the production process, factors such as: images copied askew; degraded image clarity; booklets incorrectly compiled; and too much potential for operator personality and personal relationships/grudges to affect the outcome.
Finally, an area that can cause immense frustration and time wastage is the lack of international standards on paper size. While Europe uses A4 as its standard page size, the Americas use Letter size. In addition, legal page size may make its presence felt.
When documents are distributed electronically around the world, the location in which they are printed will determine the page format that the document is printed in rather than the format that was native to the original document.
Although many software applications or printer drivers make an automatic page size adjustment as the print command is given, there may still be numerous occasions when the document formatting is just not suitable to the new paper size. Detail or information may be lost at the edge of the page, sensible paragraph formatting may be destroyed and blank pages emerge where there should be none.
Distributed printing, therefore, requires a degree of additional time and effort to be put into the document (probably in multiple locations by multiple individuals) in order to present that document to an adequate standard for the local audience – all of which has a cost attached to it.
Overall, one of the most significant factors that comes out of this discussion is the fact that users really do need a far higher degree of education and training in hard copy usage and management.
While companies put large sums into training of the users for software and new hardware devices, is there any investment made in terms of how to approach the hard copy requirements? Is any effort put into the user’s management of their time, devices and resources where hard copy is concerned?
I believe the answer is a very clear no!
Users need to be trained to determine when to print and when to copy, when to turn a device’s duplex feature on and when it is necessary to print in mono draft and when colour is required.
Clearly this is not the end of the story. Within a restricted time discussion, only so much ground can be covered. In fact, this one-hour discussion has produced enough material for two articles – part 2 to follow! Even within the scope of the subjects covered here, longer discussion would reveal many more issues and frustrations.
Please therefore, take a few moments over the coming days and weeks to reflect on what those additional issues may be in your own work environment. If you would like to forward comment for inclusion in a future issue of TCPglobal, please do not hesitate to do so.
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