Field research of production print shops

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John Milanski, InfoPrint Human Factors
Who is the Print Operator
February 19, 2009

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What questions do you need to have answered?
What problems are you trying to solve?
What don’t you know about users that you wish you did?
– What tasks do they do regularly?
– Which are the most time consuming?

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Who works in a cutsheet shop

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Sales Prepress Operations

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Sales “Sam”
• Sales Manager
• 14 yrs here

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Prepress “Paul”
• BA Journalism
• No formal training
• 16 yrs experience, 2
here
• Learned digital press
from previous
operator

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Prepress “Patty”
• BA General Studies
• No formal print
training
• 18 yrs experience, 4
here
• Doesn’t work with the
digital printer
• “My goal is to never
have the presses stop
because of a mistake
I made – it’s big
money.”

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Operator “Owen”
• Main digital operator
• No formal training in
printing or on the
digital printer he runs
• 16 yrs experience, 18
months here
• Works 10a-6p, M-F,
Sat as needed
• Works another job “to
make gas money to
get to this job.”

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Clean machines (chads, toner)
Load paper and toner
Convey status to next shift operator
Log interventions using barcode scanner
Perform regular maintenance (drum, corona, cutter, punch,
dye – unusual for a client)
Check physical size and print quality of printed sheet
Compare the printed output to a density chart
Splice paper web

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Where do they work

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• Boulder
• Family-owned business, 40 years
• Commercial large-format, quick-turnaround printing.
• 24-hr/day production, 32 emp
• Annual Revenue US$7.5M
• 3 offset, 1 digital press (Xerox DocuColor 5000); Creo
RIP; pref bind, saddle, etc
• Hagen estimation & time keeping
• Moving to PDF, Kodak Prinergy workflow

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What jobs do they do

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Brochures for sports (Pepsi Center)
Brochures for trade shows
Menus (Spicy Pickle)
Business Cards

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Customers print less ->digital
Print is a commodity
- service and stochastic line screen differentiates
- big enough to do it all in one shop, small enough
to care

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How do they do it

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Overall Process
1.Contact made
2.Files transferred
3.Estimation
4.Job signed off by customer
5.Customer Service prepares job folder
6.Prepress preflights the job and prepares a proof
7.Customer approves proof
8.Job is printed

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Overall Process
1.Contact made
2.Files transferred
3.Estimation
4.Job signed off by customer
5.Customer Service prepares job folder
6.Prepress preflights the job and prepares a proof
7.Customer approves proof
8.Job is printed

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5.Customer Service prepares job folder
6.Prepress preflights the job and prepares a proof
(all PDF)
1.Preflight (Adobe InDesign)
2.Fix color, trapping (InDesign, Illustrator)
3.Impose (Adobe Preps)
4.RIP (Creo Brisque)
5.Create TIFFs from RIP pages
6.Recreate a RIP PDF
7.Print a proof (wrong size) on digital
8.Fill in timesheet (Hagen)
7.Customer approves proof
8.Job is printed on digital or offset
1.Pressman uses proof to check his work

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In Summary
• Operators are often untrained, inexperienced,
poorly paid, and rushed
• Operators make sure the printer is always
printing (maintain the printer, start jobs)
• POD Printing is very price sensitive
• Print shops want to reduce costs (print faster
and cheaper), and differentiate (do-it-all)
• If you have a user question, ask me
John Milanski, jmilans@us.ibm.com, 303-924-6639

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Appendix

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Alpine 1 Beta – Lessons Learned
•Standard Publishing
•Maintain color consistency
•Be sensitive to offset environment
•Cannot print duplex on paper >220gsm
•No coated paper <130gsm
•May cut offset paper for use in the cutsheet machine
•PQ using a photospectrometer
•Stay away from small shops
•Offset customers lack digital printing skills
•Print quality is subjective
•Peak print period at the end of the year
•Expectations for digital color are different than for offset color
•Customers will run unapproved papers

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What’s a Persona?
You are not your user
• Profile of a typical user, a primary user
• Based on firsthand observation
• Based on 3-30 real people
• Keeps the development team focused
• A summary of research for executives
• Part of a larger process:
• Research findings->Personas->scenarios-
>requirements
• use to evaluate design ideas
• Eliminate ‘I think’ from the development
process

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How do you make a Persona?
1. Conduct research
• Create a survey (~15 multiple choice questions)
• Follow-up with interviews
• Exploratory Factor Analysis to group responses
• Send via URL
2. Gather the project team
3. Tell stories from the research
4. Create personas together
• Picture, name, job title
• skill level (experience, education, prior jobs)
• Frustrations
• Goals (for the machine, for the company, for themselves)
– What they want to accomplish
• Environment/context
• Workflows
5. Validate by showing them to people who know those
users