Labs/Test Pilot/Test Proposals/Printing

Reliability of Printing Study

• Proposer: Kuno (kuno.meyer@gmx.ch)
• Status: Draft
• Duration: 1-2 Months

Introduction

Printing out web content is common action, particularly for occasional users of web browsers. Printing is also used for important content like account credentials, contracts, contact data and so on.

Unfortunately, printing is in Firefox an inherently unreliable: Apart from several print bugs being there for years and causing incomplete printouts, you can never be sure whether what you'll get on paper is what you see on screen with regard to font size, document truncation, readability (dark backgrounds that are not printed) and so on.

Goals

Answering the following questions should give an indication whether and how the print system could be improved:

• Is the "Print" feature used by users?
• Is the "Print Preview" feature used by users?
• Is the "Restrict Print Range" feature used by users?
• Is the result of the first print operation good enough for the user to not print a second time with different settings?

Data to be collected from every user

• How many times does the user print something?
• How many times does the user open the "print preview" window?
• With which scale setting does the user print?
• Did the user restrict the print range to a selection or a page range?

• Does the user print any URL multiple times in sequence. How many repetitions?
• When the same URL is printed multiple times, did some of the settings in point 3 or 4 change?

(PS: Please feel free to correct any grammar and spelling issues.)