HP AI Print — UX Lead

(Future-of-printing exploration → PoC → award-winning concept)

Business Challenge

My assignment for this project was simple on paper and terrifying in practice: “Define the future of printing.” Not 10 years ahead, not sci-fi speculation — but the near-future, the next meaningful step that could genuinely improve the everyday printing experience.

So I started by asking a basic but revealing question: What do people actually print today?
Flights. Event tickets. Recipes. Forms. Articles. Instructions.
Real, everyday content — all coming from the web.

Approach

I began mapping the current pain points: printing recipes full of ads and buttons, pages that break formatting, PDFs that don’t exist, images with captions you don’t want, or content that looks perfect on screen but terrible on paper.

From this, I wrote user stories like:

“As a home cook, I want to print a clean recipe that doesn’t include half the internet.”

“As a traveler, I want to print my tickets without banners or margins getting cut.”

“As a reader, I want a summary of a long article in my own language.”

This quickly evolved into a bigger idea: freeing content from the rigid structure of the web so users could customize it — change font, layout, color, remove clutter — and print exactly what they need. Something between an editor, a formatter, and a meme generator, but for everyday documents.

Another core principle was bridging the digital → physical gap. If HP wanted people to print more (and better), the printing experience needed to add value — not friction. That meant exploring how AI could clean, adapt, summarize, translate, and personalize content before it reaches paper.

With this in mind, I developed multiple proofs of concept exploring:

• AI-based content cleaning
• Summaries for long articles
• Translation before printing
• Smarter layout generation
• A “content liberation” engine that restructures web pages
• Quick editing & customization before printing

Once the concept was stable, I built interactive prototypes and ran rounds of user interviews and testing. Their feedback shaped the next iterations and made it clear: this had to be a web-based widget, living directly inside the browser — meeting users exactly where printing begins.

Selling the vision

I personally pitched the concept internally at HP: first to my director, then to the Director of Customer Experience, and later to several Product Owners across different orgs. Since I belonged to another team, part of my job was transferring the concept into the teams that would eventually own the product — while continuing to guide the vision, UX rationale, and problem-framing.

Outcome

The concept became the foundation of HP AI Print, a browser-based widget that helps users clean, customize, and format web content before printing — intelligently, simply, and in real time. It aligned multiple departments, leveraged AI in a meaningful way, and reframed “printing” from something painful into something empowering.

The project won the UX Design Award 2025, but the real success was watching users say:
"Oh wow… this actually fixes printing."