In 1995-96 engineers at Xerox were pioneering the use of the Internet as a medium for printing applications. This may seem trivial today, but at that point the Internet was really only a medium for web pages. The promise of developing once for many platforms through the use of HTML was a huge opportunity, offering disparate operating systems and computing platforms the ability to do printing services from anywhere.

Early demos were ugly at best, but showed that the technology was ready. As an intern with Internet experience, I was brought in to help develop a user-interface that would make this idea easy to use and engaging. The limiting factor was the 2.0 browser technologies, and the fact that the pages had to be served off of a 2-4MB Flash chip. Not a lot of space for a web site.

The design team's early solutions focused on being clean and friendly with a few choice graphics that played off of the control panel buttons used on Xerox devices. Later concepts, and the final prototypes leveraged Xerox's coherent user interfaces from existing products; UI's that were based on a familiar tab metaphor. Bringing a tab based, application-like interface to the web ended up being a compelling and usable concept that boosted users' transfer of learning from existing experience. The web-application User-Interface at Xerox was born.

This user-interface was then carried through Xerox's product line with standards developed by the Industrial Design Human Interface group to insure coherent UI branding and workflow. The software sells with many of Xerox 's Award Winning networked laser printers. You can view demos of the software served from Xerox.com by selecting a link below.

Xerox DocuPrint N17
Xerox DocuPrint N24/32/40
Xerox DocuPrint C55