A short, anecdote showing the importance of fully accounting for everything that goes into delivering a promise. Services fail or fall short of expectations when there are gaps of conflicts in their designs.
What happened in Vegas
So, this guy walks into a print shop in Las Vegas and hands over a PDF document of roughly 40 pages. He needs 25 copies to be printed and spiral bound by the following morning. The standard, black and white option is cheaper and reasonably good but then the staff point to the full colour option on premium paper. They print a sample to show how much more appealing the printed product could be. Far better indeed. It would be a costlier affair but our man thinks it's worth it and agrees to go with that option. The next day, when picking up the finished product he inspects the copies. All 25 are there as promised. He randomly selects a few copies and thumbs through them. The first few copies look great but then, further on, several copies have pages with a lower quality of finish. The colours not as rich. The prints appear slightly faded. Hmm, why? The staff give the following explanation. 'Yeah, that happens with many large jobs as the ink levels in the toner cartridges falls.' That makes sense, from a technical point of view. But isn't the shop charging exactly the same price for every copy, dollar and cent? Yes, but that's how it is. Not every page in every copy will be of the same quality.
Finicky customer!
If there is only a slight variation in the quality of some of the copies, is the customer being finicky? There aren't any major defects, such as missing pages or distorted images. So why cry over a few particles of ink? The copies are printed, aren't they? That's what the print shop is charging for, isn't it? The printing? The customer begged to disagree, insisting that it's not just the act of printing but also the print i.e. paper and ink. Not just the verb, but also the noun. Not just converting pixels into pigment at 600 dots per inch, but also every dot of ink. After all, that's what the price difference was all about, wasn't it? After much discussion, the staff agreed to reprint the few copies that fell short of the promise. The shop is part of an industry giant with over 2000 locations. They could shrug off the additional cost. However, that is not the point of telling this story. The point here is the staff did not even see what the problem was.
What is a print shop actually promising?
The promise of performance: the printing process (verb)
The 'printing' of the document involves the translating the coded contents of a file into an electrostatic inkable impression. A processing logic figures out the physics of organising billions of particles of ink into the requisite number of dots per inch for high-resolution. Reprographic hardware and software work together to create the printed image, with plates and drums executing the detailed plan for placing millions of dots of ink, each dot composed of extremely fine particles of toner powder.
The promise of affordance: paper, ink, and other consumables
Enter, paper and ink. Every machine has an adequate supply of paper and ink in the form of toner particles, just sitting there waiting for the performance to happen on a moment's notice. In the case of the standard colour laser printer, there are four separate toner cartridges: cyan, magenta, yellow and key (black). Without those supplies, the 'printing' would simply be an extremely elaborate, electronic pantomime of sound and light — a pointless performance without a lasting impression.
Printing, as a service.
Why do people go to print shops, even if they have colour printers at offices or homes? One reason is because they may not have access to those resources within a window of opportunity. Like our man in Vegas, they may be at a conference and may have decided to print the material locally, instead of lugging it all the way from New York. Also because, print shops have supplies and equipment that support printing in larger formats and larger volumes, compared to office printers that tend not have industrial capacity. Print shops maintain such capacity, confident of the fact that many people, and for several other reasons, will want some printing done. Thus, they take the risk of maintaining an array of printers and printing supplies to be able to promise on-demand performances and affordances.
Pricing a print
The pricing for colour printing works something like this: You pay a fixed price per page regardless of how detailed, rich and colourful the image is. A page may have a Kathakali dancer from India during Onam, elaborate psychedelic art by Jesse Pinkman, or the tiny hut appearing as a black speck against the backdrop of the stunning white starkness of Siberia. That is to say, wildly varying in terms of the amount of toner supplied from each of the four cartridges. Regardless of how much C, M, Y or K a page may consume – very little or a whole lot – the price per page is the same. Some pages are more profitable to the printer than others. Some may even make a loss. But printers spread the risk across a very large and diverse population of pages to be printed. The pages subsidise each other. With the fixed pricing in place, each page is either getting a discount on the ink or overpaying for it. The printer has a chance for profit.
Full value
Every single page in every single copy should get exactly the same amount on ink. If a machine is low on toner in any of its cartridges, then the print shop staff should replace the cartridge before executing a job that would consume a lot of material. Knowing whether toner levels will drop below a critical level during a print job, requires a computation. But even desktop publishing software can handle that, with algorithms that take one look at the file to be printed and do the math. The real issue — the flaw in the design of the service – is not recognising the full value associated with the fixed price. Unless that happens, there will continue to be instances of pages not being printed to the fullest satisfaction of finicky customers.
Conclusion
There is a reason why, in manufacturing, a bill of materials is an integral part of the design and engineering process. That's how we account for machines, equipment, parts, materials, time, and labour, whether we are producing pencils or phones. But a similar concept is rarely part of the process when designing services and contracts. What we call "service design", tends to focus too much on front-stage user experience. What we might call "contract design", tends to focus too much on terms and conditions. Performances and affordances have to be fully costed, as part of the design process, to get a full view into all the possible errors and failures. Ink and paper aren't the only consumables in the printing of a document. The machines consume energy, there is toner waste after every impression, parts suffer wear and tear. Every now and then the machines need maintenance and repair to keep them in top condition. And of course, there is a carrying cost for maintaining supplies on the shelf, and disposal costs. After accounting for all the direct and overhead costs, every page in every job should receive its full complement of ink.
