Have you ever heard the old joke about how many programmers it will take to change a light bulb? -- None, it's a hardware problem.

After the following experience, one might think the answer above is the logic of HP -- the worlds largest provider of printers.

The other day I found my self in need of scanning a document. A company was asking me to fax a signed non-disclosure agreement to them -- Who has a fax these days anyway??

So I thought to myself, aha, I'll just scan the document with my signature on the HP PSC 2110 combined printer and scanner I have next door. Though I had not used the printer with my current laptop, I thought to myself, How hard can it be to get a bit of HP hardware running these days? (man, was I wrong...) I had already used it on my old laptop, so I set out with confidence on what was to become a quest longer than expected.

First I eagerly put the document in the scanner, and connected to it via a USB cable. Windows came up with "Found New Hardware" dialog. I nodded - Sure BillG, please attempt to find the right driver for me. Then confidence started dropping. Another "Found New Hardware", and another, and another, and another. Damn, how many different devices exists in this printer/scanner that needs drivers installed seperately? Well.. the number of dialogs wasn't really what scared me the most. The fact that some of them completed successfully while others said the hardware could not be installed successfully, concerned me a bit more.

Hmm... okay, plug and play -- yeah right. I decided to do it the ol'fashioned way. Pick the right drivers directly from hp.com, and install it myself. At this point I was yet to discover that the road ahead was to be filled with trouble and despair.

I went to Google and typed "HP PSC 2110 driver download" - And as anyone would expect I found the correct site in a few seconds. I clicked "Windows XP" as operating system and got a list of downloadable files. I scrolled to the "Driver" section. ...And stopped. I need to download a 166 mb driver?? You got to be kidding me HP! Though I haven't written a lot of hardware drivers I just know, that no hardware driver will even come close to 166 megs!

You would think that engineers at HP had tried Windows Update from Microsoft, which - though not perfect - features to ability to download, only whats needed, in the user's particular context. But no, some product owner guy at HP probably convinced everyone around him that users would rather spend their precious time downloading 166 mb of bloated irrelevant software (with photo viewing capabilities!! - amazing!)

Though shocked I convinced myself that if I just downloaded the driver, everything would work out just fine.

..30 minutes later..

I started the installer and for a second I was thinking ... "Hey, maybe it will just work right away". After a few moments the installer asked me to plug in the scanner in the USB port. And so I did ...and waited.... and waited... I went to pick up lunch, and came back 10 minutes later. Now it said that the installation was unsuccessful, and asked me to look in the readme file (only way out was an "Okay" button). What in the world should I look for in the readme file? Why was it unsuccessful? Why doesn't it just work...? I was all of a sudden feeling very tired.

I could see that the installer had put two shortcuts on my desktop. "HP Director" which I had no clue what might be, and "HP Photo & Imaging"... I clicked the latter, found a Scan button and clicked it. The program asked me to select a source... unfortunately the list of available sources was empty, though my scanner was plugged in. Hmm... great, a partial install.

..an hour passed, I tried back and forth but still wasn't able to scan my document and I gave up. I thought to myself, maybe I should just buy another scanner?

Looking back, I wonder if it is possible to find a vendor that takes software, drivers and particularly user experience more seriously?

I admit, that if had I bought a just-released-to-market, highly complex, all-new-technology piece of hardware - I might run into problems like this. But dammit, this is a printer and scanner, using technology that is 20 years old, running on the most common operating system on the planet.

Well.. the PSC 2110 is a couple of years old. So maybe HP is so busy releasing new printers that they don't update and maintain drivers for their old stuff? While this could be true... I certainly doesn't hope it is the case. Dear HP... users don't need new printers, they need working printers!

If I put my software background aside, and step into the world of my favorite fictional user, nice old Mrs. Jensen, it all seems even more bizarre. How on earth did HP expect her to figure this stuff out?

So dear HP - I got to say, you got one sceptic customer, to say the least. And I can't believe I'm the only one who is experiencing this. Why not seize this opportunity to tap into one of the most valuable sources of information -- user feedback. The guys responsible for maintaining content at hp.com seemed to get that user feedback is important. I guess otherwise they wouldn't have implemented an online feedback system. I got to admit that I found it a bit strange that they asked me to give them feedback about the web experience in the "driver downloads" section of their website. See for yourself: "Thank you for taking the time to provide this information. This will help us to provide a better download experience in the future."

I did consider writing "I'll give you feedback on the experience in 30 minutes, once my printer driver download is completed", but maybe they wouldn't get the irony.

Who gives a damn about the download experience anyway? I'm not the kind of guy that comes about driver download pages without an underlying reason, like wanting to scan a document. So why not ask me for feedback in the context of the whole experience, instead of "Is this web page useful?". I mean -- dear HP, you do not earn money from having a nice structured website. You earn money, marketshare and respect by understanding and helping users users facing problems - like "I need to print a document". So if I were to give you some advice based on this experience - ask yourself: "How can we solve the problems our users face, faster and easier than anyone else?"

I could talk for days about this bizarre experience -- but I'll leave it here, for HP or anyone else to comment

Oh and by the way, yes - I did submit this experience through HP's online feedback system. Now the real question is whether those responsible for the drivers download pages, will actually forward it to the appropriate team inside HP...

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What if there was just ONE file to download from the HP website, no matter which HP printer you had. A simple probing utility no larger than 500kb, which would probe your printer, download and install the right driver. And I bet it could be done with no more than a single click by the end-user. I wonder how that would affect the number of support incidents at HP.

By Sune Gynthersen