User Experience Focused Design of Online Printing Quotation System

The printing and packaging industry are confronting great challenges in the digital era. One of the most problems is the professional talents’ shortage, which becomes more severe nowadays. The paper studies on the development of a quotation app on printing product with easy-to-use features and without much demand for professional knowledge. The app can help build the fluent communication between the print buyer and print shop when a business begins. Focusing on the user experience rules, we purpose an innovative method to connect the material consumption to the product components and then to their real production processes in a digital mode, substituting the traditional description style based on the BOM (bill of material) of product which depends largely on the businessman’s professional calculation in manual mode. The new method supports the quotation process on the digitized professional knowledge and experiences in printing and also on the smart functions’s automatic calculation following the practical operation, which ensures the production involved data in accordance along all the production processes. While the app is intuitive and easy to use, it can also keep the quotation precise and reasonable. This exploratory research is on one of the key problems in the aspects of smart printing production. The developed online pricing app can help to realize the fluent data exchange between print customer and printing shop. Its data collection mode guarantees the realization of globally digital and smart communication during the whole production procedures.