This project focused on helping HP large format printers to grow print usage in current and new customers. After having some market researches related to the printing industry and doing some interviews with the people who already use, or have a potential to use these large format printers; a current customer journey was shaped.

In this journey, there is an architect and an it manager, who have to work in collaboration during the work day. Both of them have different problems in their jobs owing to troubles in printers such as ink problems, lack of paper, breakdown of machines etc. And they enter into arguments since they failed at job because of these printing problems. So unfortunately they lose their time and energy.

Moreover, this journey with its weak points is a real part of a big market. This means too many workers in companies face with these problems.

Think about it! You work for a big company, every day you have you use these printers and in a day you face with several problems. Also you enter into some arguments with your colleague because of these problems. Both of you feel stressed, angry during the day. This probably affects your works’ quality in a negative way. Additionally, this maybe affect badly the flow of your life in the long term. This shouldn’t be a good situation!
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Let’s change something in these guys’ lives! The actors are architect and it manager. And their need is having more communication to be able to work more efficient. And the solution is an application! But how?

Your colleagues/coworkers can be a human or a machine, but it never changes that ‘the more communication you have, the more easily you do something together’. So we believe that if you are more connected to your machine/the printer and you can trust it, you will definitely work more efficiently and more easily.

In that point we created our opportunity question ‘How we can create a bond between printers and customers to promote trust to the printers?‘ Then when we started to think about the solution, we decided to focus on a trend ‘your body is your interface’. In this trend you can use your voice, body language, intonation and gestures to interact with technology just like the people. We decided to create an application which is called ‘Connect Your HP’. This application can use voice technologies like voice recognition to check printer status, printing status and be aware of the errors that printer has. With the help of this application the workers like architect and it manager can monitor their printers and printings and they can under control all printer problems before they or their colleagues face with them.

How does the application work?

After a simple registration process, the application gives you 3 different main options; add new printer, check your printer status and check your printings. When you want to add new printer, the application again gives you 2 different options; visitor or owner. What is the difference of these options? If you are an owner,you can see all the information related to printer and you can receive the notifications from the printer. For example; ‘the inks of printer X are almost empty’. On the other hand, if you are a visitor, and you do not have any responsibilities related to the printer status in your job, you do not receive these kind of messages from the printer. But you can do it in printing status part easily.

Also after the first registration, you can activate the application and request some information by using your voice like ‘Siri’.

The positive effect of application can easily be seen on the new customer journey. The it manager can easily receive messages related to the printers’ status from the application. So he can adjust the problems before the architect face with them. And architect can have her printing without being in a trouble and she can control printing status not to lose extra time.

So with the help of the application both of them decrease their stress level and work more efficiently. Namely, they can be more connected to their printers and so work better together. Obviously, the application changed the actors’ work day, and has a real big power to affect their lives in a positive way.

Let’s test it! We tested the application with 4 architects and 2 it managers and we asked them ‘Would you recommend Connect Your HP? Please rate it.’ And the average of their ratings is 6.7 . On the other hand, the prototype, which is used in testing process, does not have voice recognition feature. When the voice recognition part will be added to the application, the result will go higher.

Lastly, this is a first step of a real big project. This business can be created with the existing technologies. But in the next phases of the project, it can be developed by using the emergin gtechnologies like brain machine interface technology. People can use thei remotions to control and check all these things. But measuring the positive or negative effects of the AI technologies to your business is too difficult without experienced it. And it needs huge investments. So many of the companies have worries for using high technologies and they prefer to walk on thin ice. Hence Connect Your HP is a good step to try to create a connection between HP’s printers and HP’s customers with less effort.