The best print technology is boring print technology

Any system architect will tell you that the best infrastructure is the infrastructure users hardly even notice. Works for networks, works for servers, and it works for printing too.

Printing is one of those technologies that people only notice when it goes wrong. Which is why great print infrastructure should feel almost invisible. Boring. Frictionless.

Users should be able to print from the device they have, wherever they are, without needing to understand complicated print servers, drivers, networks, queues, or protocols.

When a printer can’t be found, or a queue hasn’t been deployed, the user doesn’t actually care – they just want to print.

They just want to get from Point A to Point B. And that’s the standard modern print infrastructure should be aiming for: technology that gets people where they need to go and then gets out of their way. For IT teams, creating that simplicity means (ironically) designing around people, rather than printers.

Start with the person, not the printer

Traditionally, print environments often began with the infrastructure. i.e., the printers. Which printer was connected to which server? Which driver did it need? Which network was the user on? Those questions still matter to IT, sure, but they don’t necessarily matter to the person trying to print.

From a user’s perspective, the experience can be much simpler. They should be able to open a document, hit Print, find an appropriate printer, and send the job. That’s it!

The infrastructure should handle the complexity beyond that: discovery, authentication, routing, driver compatibility, policies, and delivery. All that stuff should be invisible to the average person on the street (or level 6) looking for a paper tray.

This is a useful distinction when designing a print environment: the complexity doesn’t have to disappear; it just needs to not get in the way.

Design for a fragmented ecosystem

It’s a fact of modern life that the workplace isn’t built around one type of computer anymore. Hybrid work is here to stay, which means Windows PCs will sit alongside Macs. Employees might use ChromeOS devices, phones or tablets, while contractors and guests bring their own devices. Organizations may also have a mix of corporate-managed and BYOD endpoints.

A good print experience shouldn’t require everyone to have the ‘right’ device. From a user’s perspective, that distinction shouldn’t even exist.

For sysadmins, this means supporting the platforms people actually use and providing appropriate ways to connect them to organizational printers. It also means avoiding unnecessary differences in the user experience between operating systems.

Make location increasingly irrelevant

The old model of workplace printing assumed a relatively fixed relationship: one user, one computer, one network, one office, and one printer connected by a tangled, dust-covered Centronics cable. Hybrid work has changed all that.

People move now – between offices, shared workspaces, hot desks, and homes. A laptop might connect to a completely different network from one day to the next. Organizations themselves might have multiple sites with different infrastructure and printer fleets. Your print experience needs to account for this fundamental mobility.

Instead of making users understand which network or print server they’re connected to, IT should design an environment where the relevant printers are discoverable and available based on the user’s context and permissions. Different paths, one experience. It’s what Find-Me printing is all about.

PaperCut Mobility Print can provide a familiar way for users to discover and print to organizational printers across supported devices and environments. Web Print is another good option, especially when installing a print driver isn’t practical.

These approaches don’t have to compete, either. They can solve different problems while contributing to the same overall consistent, frictionless, wonderfully boring experience. The important thing is that users shouldn’t need to understand the architecture behind their choices. They just need an intuitive path to the printer.

Keep security in the background

Now we want to emphasize that making printing easy doesn’t mean making it uncontrolled. Print security and print usability should support and complement one another; they’re not mutually exclusive. But just like good design, good security doesn’t always have to announce itself.

For example, Secure Print Release solves both problems at once. It can help prevent confidential documents from being left unattended at a shared printer while at the same time allowing the user to follow a simple A-to-B workflow. The security mechanisms are doing important work, but the user experience doesn’t suffer. Everybody wins.

Remove small points of friction

The biggest improvements aren’t always the most sophisticated features. Printer discovery matters. Automatic queue deployment matters. Consistent printer naming matters. Familiar interfaces matter. Authentication that happens at the right point in the workflow matters.

All of these are little things in isolation, but they add up to a great user experience. They’re the bits that determine whether printing feels effortless and boring, or tear-your-own-hair-out frustrating.

For IT teams, this is where user-centered design actually becomes practical. Ask your users what they have to think about before they hit print (all the little, time-consuming steps), then look for ways to actually remove those decisions. The fewer decisions, the simpler the process, the happier your users will be.

Invisible doesn’t mean dumb

The easiest technology to use can require some of the most thoughtful, elegant engineering behind the scenes. But the key bit there is ‘behind the scenes’.

A print environment that feels effortless will probably involve mobile device management, cloud services, print servers, network configuration, authentication, security policies, printer discovery, and multiple printing protocols all working together. But users don’t need to see any of that. They just want to print – quickly, securely, and without any fuss.

The real measure of good print infrastructure, therefore, isn’t how much technology an organization has deployed. It’s how effectively that technology stays out of the way, and how well it accomplishes what it was implemented to solve in the first place.

So if your users find your print environment boring, that’s a good sign. Boring means it works.