Out of Box Experience Design - HP

The importance of the customers’ first experience with any product, commonly known as the Out of Box Experience (OOBE), cannot be underestimated. It is essential that the user have a trouble free experience setting-up and using the product. A well-designed OOBE will reduce calls to customer support, lower product returns and boost sales.

For complex products such as Large Format Printers the role of the OOBE is critical. Each printer requires physical assembly, loading of consumables, network configuration and software set-up before the user can start to print. Frontend worked with HP on a number of products to improve the OOBE of their large format products. We performed user research, task analysis and competitor evaluations in order to assess the most efficient design for this set-up process.

Through iterative cycles of design and testing with real users, we refined the process until the time-to-task completion was within the acceptable timeframe. As part of our project role we also oversaw the design of the printed instructional material, front panel instructions and the installation CD.