While at RKS, I was the ID lead for a redesign of Zebra’s desktop portfolio of thermal printers. This included global co-creation with a variety of vendors and users and ultimately yielded both large improvements in the user experience, design awards including the Red Dot, and significant IP that has helped Zebra maintain it’s leadership in the category.
Thermal printers are used on demand in a variety of settings including shipping, transportation and logistics, healthcare and retail. These environments can feature demanding conditions and a large variety of users (with varying levels of familiarity) may need to use the devices.
Initial research included site visits to better understand usage and settings as well as extensive experience and design benchmarking of existing Zebra products as well as their competitors..
This research was assembled into several personas and user journeys. Pain points were prioritized on a user by user basis and then evaluated as a whole in order to help prioritize the key challenges that ID would seek to address.
This foundation was used as a catalyst for a cross-functional brainstorm of experiential features and architectures. In particular, the ribbon-changing experience on the more complex 4” printers was noted as a key pain point as well as the relationship between the locations of the media and ribbon in the device.
The ideas were then distilled into a series of stimuli concepts intended to explore varying functionality. This was augmented with additional paper stimuli and card sorting exercises to explore visual design language and communication.
Along with design research and client observers, I participated in a multiple market (US, UK, China) co-creative study to elicit reactions and help define the desired user experience.
The resulting ZD 410 2” direct thermal printer prioritized compactness in the design while offering improvements to touchpoints updated styling and CMF for industrial and healthcare applications.
The more complex ZD 420 also kept the shroudlike design language and emphasis on compactness while addressing several signficant user experience challenges. The device opened to a greater angle allowing easier media changes and featured an innovative ribbon cartridge system that significantly reduced reload times as well as provided zebra an additional line of recurring revenue.
The basic design language has since been integrated across a number of additional products and accessories in the Zebra desktop portfolio.