PrintMarmoset: Redesigning the Print Button for Sustainability

Authors

Jun Xiao
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
Palo Alto, CA USA
jun.xiao2@hp.com


Jian Fan
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
Palo Alto, CA USA
jian.fan@hp.com

Summary
This paper focuses on Sustainable Interaction Design, design which aims to alleviate the problems associated with dwindling natural resources by shifting from production of new products to production of sustainable growth products. Specifically, they focus on redesigning the print button to minimize erroneous prints and other various paper wastes and in turn, promote sustainability.

Users in the study were studied to reveal what and how often they printed and the results were critically examined to draw conclusions. The found that users printed information that was digitally available because it saved time(in the case of printing a map vs using a GPS), it was easier to user(in the case of printing a pdf instead of viewing it on screen), it signified importance(in the case of printing a website instead of emailing a link), and the information was volatile and needed to be preserved(in the case of news articles being constantly updated).  These cases were generalized to say that printing served four main functions: display, delivery, sharing, and storage.

While this paper did not aim to resolve these problems, it did attempt to minimize the problem of erroneous or unnecessary prints. People reported printing out webcontent because it was necessary but only to find their printout riddled with web advertisements or malformatting which rendered the printout useless and therefore thrown away as waste.

Their goal was to create a solution that required 1) require neither developers to modify existing web sites nor users to change existing print flow; 2) require the least amount of user input effort, if not zero; 3) offer flexibility that allows users to choose what to print in addition to pre-defined filter or template; 4) maintain a history of print activities for collecting and organizing web clips; 5) raise awareness of the tool among people and build a “green” community around it.

The resulting solution was PrintMarmoset, a Firefox extension that allowed the user to better select what needed to be printed.  The user would click the icon for the extension, "stroke" through webcontent that was unnecessary, and then click the icon again to print what was selected.

People commented that PrintMarmoset is WYSIWYG and the UI was easy to use. The authors commented that the tool did not satisfy all users but that that was an impossible task to accomplish.

Discussion
This seems like an awesome idea to be honest.  Many times have I wanted to print a website only to see that the advertisements have completely ruined the layout of the print or have offset the layout to produced unneeded blank pages with just the website printed at the bottom.  These pages are then thrown away as a wasted print and paper is subsequently unnecessarily wasted.  I'll have to try this extension out to see just how user friendly it is, but the concept itself seems hopeful.