Document Preparation
Backstory
With paper documents it is usually unambiguous which pages go together. They are stapled, clipped, or somehow physically grouped. Documents that went together were also grouped in folders or clips or redwelds. Document production operators were expert in disassembling, duplicating and reassembling these very important groupings. While it might sound simple to a layperson, recreating a 3,000-page box of documents grouped with staples, clips, folders and redwelds under tight time constraints, with very little margin for error, is actually quite difficult and a valuable hard-earned skill.
Problem
Most scanning tools provided the means to recreate all of the necessary groupings but the interface and the process was entirely foreign to the operators. Document scanning software was not designed for the users who knew the documents best.
Solution
In our first iteration we designed bar-coded patch pages to mark the beginning and ending of each document group. Operators could quickly disassemble the original documents and insert patch pages to mark the groupings. The scanning process was also faster because large batches of paper could be scanned at one time with the groupings automatically captured via the bar-coded sheets.
The patch pages were designed to be printed on colored paper (documents on blue, folders on yellow, etc.) with the intended paper color displayed in text, the numeric bar code values were displayed beneath each bar code, and the codes were on opposite corners of the page so orientation did not matter. However, since bar code recognition was not 100% accurate, each page also included a large circle and we added a tiled thumbnail review of the box. The patch pages clearly stood out and were able to be identified and fixed.
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