Work

HP Instant Services: Designing a Subscription Experience at Scale

HP Inc. · Senior Design Manager · 2021–Present

The Challenge

HP Instant Ink is one of HP’s most strategically important businesses: a subscription service that delivers ink and toner directly to customers before they run out. When I joined as Senior Design Manager, the program had already grown to 10 million subscribers, but the customer experience hadn’t fully kept pace with that scale. Enrollment was more complex than it needed to be, subscribers weren’t always getting enough value from the service to stay, and the design team needed stronger processes, clearer ownership, and a vision that could grow with the business. Adding to the complexity: cartridge-based printer sales were declining across the industry, which meant fewer new printer buyers entering the top of the funnel each year. The work ahead was two-sided: drive more conversion from the funnel that existed, and reduce churn among the subscribers already in it.

My Role

As Senior Design Manager, I lead the full customer-facing design of HP Instant Ink, spanning web, mobile, and printer touchpoints, and serve as the primary design voice in cross-functional partnerships with product management, engineering, marketing, and data science.

I guide design across the entire customer lifecycle: enrollment and onboarding, account management, plan changes, support flows, and retention. My team’s work touches millions of subscribers in dozens of countries.

Key Initiatives

Enrollment & Growth

Getting customers enrolled in Instant Ink is the most critical moment in the subscriber journey, and the team has invested deeply in making that moment as fast and frictionless as possible across multiple surfaces.

Enroll & Connect fundamentally rethought how customers join Instant Ink by decoupling subscription enrollment from the printer claiming process. The original flow required both to happen in sequence, creating technical drop-off that cost the business real subscribers. Separating them removed the primary source of friction at the point of conversion:

• +60% worldwide web enrollment conversion lift
• +23% YoY increase in web enrollments

Setup-time enrollment, the onramp that surfaces during printer setup, is an equally important focus. Through multiple redesigns and constant A/B testing, the team has steadily reduced the length and complexity of this flow. A key advancement was prompting for the customer’s address early and autofilling it downstream, dramatically cutting the manual input required at the top of the funnel.

HP App onramps are a major driver of enrollment for existing printer owners. When a customer taps on ink levels or “get supplies,” they’re served an interstitial page that introduces the subscription. The team treats this surface as a continuous design challenge, A/B testing constantly and developing new concepts that make the pitch more contextual and personalized based on where the customer is in their ink lifecycle.

Payment options were expanded to include PayPal, Google Wallet, and Apple Pay, meeting customers where they already manage their digital payments and removing a final layer of friction from the enrollment flow.

Retention & Trust

Subscriber growth only compounds if churn stays low. Alongside enrollment work, the team invested significantly in helping subscribers understand and appreciate the value of the service, and in ensuring that customers who do leave have a clear, trustworthy experience when they go.

Portal and account redesign focused on giving subscribers a clearer, more empowering view of their service: their usage, their plan, their options. Better comprehension of how Instant Ink works, and what value they’re getting, directly supports retention by reducing the number of subscribers who cancel simply because the service feels opaque.

Cancellation redesign addressed one of Instant Ink’s most persistent problems: subscribers who cancelled without realizing that the cartridges provided by the service would stop working at cancellation. This consistently drove negative sentiment and damaged trust in the brand. Research confirmed the issue was a communication problem, not a pricing problem. Subscribers weren’t opposed to the service, they just didn’t understand what they were agreeing to or what would happen when they left.

The redesigned flow made the consequences explicit: a clear timeline showing when service would stop, when the final bill would arrive, and when cartridges would be deactivated. It also introduced alternatives at the moment of cancellation intent: pause and downgrade options, rather than buried in account settings. The outcome was meaningful retention without dark patterns, and the work became an internal model for trust-preserving retention design.

One of the most strategically valuable findings from this work: research showed that subscribers who reach the cancellation flow have typically already made their decision. The real intervention opportunity is earlier: in onboarding, dashboards, and ongoing education about how the service works. That insight has since shaped how the team thinks about the entire post-enrollment experience.

Expanding the Service

My team has led design for major expansions of Instant Ink beyond its original consumer footprint:

• Instant Ink for SMB: multi-printer, admin-managed subscriptions that opened an entirely new business segment
• Paper subscriptions: an add-on service that increased revenue per subscriber and deepened stickiness
• New plan types: yearly plans, usage-based options, and hybrid models that gave customers more flexibility and improved long-term retention

Results

Since 2021, HP Instant Ink has grown from 10 million to 13 million global subscribers. That growth is more significant in context: over the same period, sales of cartridge-based HP printers declined, shrinking the pool of potential new subscribers entering the funnel each year. Growing the subscriber base against that headwind meant the design work had to perform, driving more conversion from every enrollment surface, expanding the service to reach new customer segments, and keeping existing subscribers engaged and retained.

Leadership Approach

I’ve focused on building a team that does its best work: clear process, regular critique, space for craft, and strong relationships across product, engineering, marketing, and data. I work to ensure design has a meaningful voice in strategy conversations, not just execution. I translate user insights into business language and business priorities into design direction.

HP User-Centric Digital Ecosystem: Designing Connected Experiences at Scale

HP Inc. · Ecosystem UX Lead · 2019–2021

The Challenge

As HP expanded across apps, devices, subscription services, and web portals, a critical problem emerged: each product team was designing in isolation. The printer setup experience didn’t connect to the HP Smart app. The app’s onboarding didn’t anticipate what a new subscriber would need. The web portal told a different story than the box in the customer’s hands. HP had built a portfolio of products — but not an ecosystem.

The challenge wasn’t any individual touchpoint. It was the space between them.

My Role

As Ecosystem UX Lead, I worked across product, platform, and strategy, partnering with software architects, firmware developers, UX researchers, and designers across multiple product teams. My mandate was to map and unify the end-to-end HP experience, ensuring that the journey a customer takes from first unboxing a printer through years of ongoing service felt intentional, cohesive, and human.

The Approach

I applied Systems Design principles to every aspect of the work, approaching the HP ecosystem not as a collection of screens but as an interconnected set of experiences with shared flows, shared language, and shared moments of trust.

Mapping the ecosystem was the foundation. I led cross-functional workshops to document every customer-facing touchpoint across HP’s product lines, from out-of-box setup and HP Smart app onboarding through Instant Ink enrollment, account management, and support. This produced HP’s first unified experience map: a shared artifact that product teams, architects, and executives could reason about together.

Defining design principles across touchpoints. Working with researchers, I identified the moments that most affected customer perception of the HP ecosystem as a whole — setup completion, first successful print, first ink delivery, and first support interaction. We established cross-team design principles to ensure these high-stakes moments were handled consistently regardless of which team owned the surface.

Closing the gaps between teams. The biggest UX failures in the ecosystem weren’t within any single product. They were at the handoff points between them. I worked directly with firmware developers to align printer UI language with the HP Smart app, and with web portal teams to ensure account management flows were consistent with what customers experienced in the app. These weren’t just coordination meetings. They were design reviews with shared standards and documented decisions.

The Outcome

The result is the HP ecosystem customers experience today: a product portfolio spanning apps, devices, and portals that, for the first time, tells a consistent story across all of them.

Setup-time Instant Ink enrollment, one of HP’s most strategically important conversion moments, was made possible by the cross-team alignment this work established. The HP Smart app became the connective tissue of the ecosystem, its role and scope informed directly by the ecosystem mapping work. And the design system and cross-team principles created during this period continue to shape how HP product teams work together today.

HP OfficeJet Pro: Redesigning Printer Setup from the Ground Up

HP Inc. · Out of Box Experience UX Lead · 2017–2019 · UX Design Award Winner

The Challenge

Setting up a printer had become a notoriously painful experience. For HP OfficeJet Pro customers, the process was taking upwards of an hour, a frustrating first impression for a product meant to make work easier. The setup experience spanned multiple touchpoints: the physical packaging, in-box instructions, the printer’s own touchscreen control panel, HP’s website, and the companion app. None of them felt designed to work together.

The Outcome

The redesigned setup experience reduced completion time from approximately one hour to under five minutes, a dramatic improvement driven by treating setup as a single end-to-end experience rather than a collection of separate touchpoints.

Full case study — including process, design decisions, and visuals — coming soon.