Design Crux Takes On The Alarm Clock
Information Applied To Graphic Design: Package Design
Why are Canadians willing to drink milk out of flexible plastic pouches that fit into reusable plastic holder, while residents of the United States are believed to be so resistant to the idea that they have not even been given the opportunity to do so? Why do Japanese consumers prefer packages that contain two tennis balls and view the standard U.S. pack of three to be cheap and undesirable? Why do Germans insist on highly detailed technical specifications on packages of videotape, while Americans don’t? Why do Swedes think that blue is masculine, while the Dutch see the color as feminine? (p8)
…80 percent of his subjects preferred the product in the box with the circles over the one with the triangles. The reason they gave was that the box with the circles was a higher–quality product than the box with the triangles—even though the contents were identical. (p211)
—The Total Package; The Evolution and Secret Meanings of Boxes, Bottles, Cans and Tubes Thomas Hine (1995 Little, Brown & Co.)
One book on great package design shows a chocolate bar wrapper. On the front of the wrapper is the only descriptive text: Dairy Free “Milk” Chocolate. Without arguing this package design’s relative greatness, I would suggest what we have here is an information problem. Dairy Free “Milk” Chocolate describes without informing, so it raises more questions than it answers. An information design perspective would shift the focus from the graphic designer’s creativity to inform the buying decision…
Unlike most data, you have some idea Venezuelan Crillo produces a high quality chocolate. The text is for undecided consumers, while the larger logotype allows instant identification. This way, those who know what they want can instantly grab it. And while my example is speculative, the general approach is time tested. Based on a start up who decided to enter the potato chip market, not altogether dissimilar a mature commodity to chocolate. The design they first tried was graphically slick. The logotype was professional. And the packaging embodied the many previous years of product management experience the two founders had. It was exactly what you are supposed to do, because everybody was doing it. New package design ideas require a new kind of packaging designer.
A New Kind Of Packaging Designer
According to the FDA, roughly half of the 6,000 medication errors reported to the agency between 1992 to 1997 were due to labeling or packaging issues.
—Accelerating Change Today Reducing Medical Errors and Improving Patient Safety
Whole system design elements
use | design | manufacture
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Product package designs just as creative as everyone else fail to differentiate. A signal–to–noise ratio which nearly bankrupt one potato chip company. The package redesign was the only thing changed about the product. Ten years and twenty–two design iterations later, that package is essentially unchanged with eight lines of type on the front of the bag. Definitions may differ, but information should probably enable the decision making process, not frustrate it.
Another dimension of package design is shape. In the industrial sector, one start up I’m tracking believes they can build an entire business on one package design. The design takes a common industrial container and rethinks it from the point of view of shipping efficiency. Using this container a company saves on shipping costs, paying for the more expensive container design in days. And when observing customers awkwardly warm bottles, makers of Hungry Jack pancake syrup changed to a short, squat, microwave safe package design. Observing use is just the kind of insight which could, moved to the medical field, result in medical packaging which helps reduce medical errors.
A creative design in which product packaging saves fifty thousand dollars per run on plastic film (a discovery from twenty–two iterations of potato chip bags) is better than creativity alone. And it just makes sense the client will pay more for it. Yet how many designers consider the entire value chain in the way Henry Ford did?
Ford had exacting specifications for Model “T” engine crates for good reason. The panels were unbolted and those same bolts used to fasten the crate panels to car frames as floorboards. Today, similar principles are used in packaging design to turn shipping cartons into point–of–purchase display racks for the very same products. Moving beyond recycling such package designs upcycle, becoming a technical nutrient in a techno–industrial ecosystem.
In taking the system view, packaging in one step of a value chain can be a product in the next. Treating information design issues as the other guy’s problem, the designer loses. The manufacturers lose. The clients lose. It makes you long for a hot new communications medium to come along and solve this problem, to the mutual advantage of everyone involved.
Related Articles:
Information Applied To Graphic Design: Color Psychology
Resources
- How Seagate learned to package like Apple is interesting because it shows the attention to packaging given by a component company you wouldn’t usually associate with customer experience design.
- PDF Accelerating Change Today Reducing Medical Errors and Improving Patient Safety Outlines the problem and scope of information design in producing favorable medical outcomes at every level.
- Siemens has announced a new type of colour display screen thin enough to be printed onto paper or foil, cheap enough for throwaway packaging. Computer games or animated infographics instructing users could be printed on the back of Siemens new packaging.
- Deborah Adler designed the ClearRx prescription–packaging system Target will use for its pill bottles. Included in the design are ergonomics, color codes, and an information hierarchy. Faraday’s pillbox packaging is cognitively difficult to open for children; but requires little physical dexterity so adults can easily open the packaging.
- Consumer Reports takes on hard to use package designs with the Oyster Awards. Heading the list of user frustrating packaging: clamshell or blister packaging.
- Study the spacer keeping pizza from sticking to the top of a pizza box and you study packaging as engineering, not simply decoration. Packaging represents a confluence of design disciplines, from interaction, to marketing, to environment (including response to competition fitting a biological context). At first generic products looked generic. Over time generic and private (store brand) labels began to mimic leading brands, then establish their own package design identity.
- Darwin’s finches have little on CD and DVD jewel box designs. Check out Jewelboxing, the cool of TriggerPacks, ecofriendly flexboxes, and Boomerang Cliptrays for mailers.
- Nothing proves packaging is interface design like Ipifini’s Programmable Liquid Container technology. Imagine a cola with 32 user–chosen flavors, or paint you turn into any of one million colors. As packaging becomes more like interaction design, packaging designers need to think in new ways.
- “Testing the Sizzle of the Steak: Usability Testing of Packaging” by Stephanie Rosenbaum and Janice Ann Rohn. Applying usability test principles produced some interesting findings. Among these were computer packaging should not look like computer packaging outside the store (to deter theft in transport and travel after unpacking). Many of the users tested had ecological concerns about excessive packaging, failed to identify and threw away key parts, and in one case would have damaged the product if the tester hadn’t stepped in (PDF file).
- When observing customers put bottles of syrup into the microwave to warm, the makers of Hungry Jack pancake syrup put theirs into a short, squat, microwavable bottle. In similar fashion, the Dutch Boy paint container redesign tackles user problems with the paint can. Both examples of use centered design techniques finding a place in package design.
- The problem presented to me: A shaving mug sold to consumers. What it is: A mixing cup to which you add water and soap, whipping it up into a lather with a brush. The reason few use shaving mugs: Push button shaving cream from a spray can. What to do? If you are anything like me, you go to the barber shop, the only place which still uses (and buys) them. The Design Crux: A little questioning as to why turned up the magic phrase, which in turn became the new tagline. Repackaged and Repositioned: Sold in sets of three or five units as a business product for barber shops with a report on how to sell more shaves. New Tagline: “When you’re selling a shave, people expect professional tools for shaving.” Advantage: An easily located and targeted base of prospective customers where there were none before.
- Off site backgrounder on color and related on site article about information tactics in color psychology.
- With design ecology, edible film packaging becomes part of the product. Packaging for a ham goes into the oven as well, becoming a glaze. Packaging for plant food is plant food. In taking the system view, design gains new meaning. Products do not become obsolete at the end of their lifetime. Instead each product (and packaging) starts a new lifecycle as a technical nutrient for an technoindustrial eco–metabolism.
Using a sliding outer sleeve with a transparent window, a design can inform without overload. Different customer segments can “dial up” information for their specific application. Users do this by sliding the window over the desired text printed on the inner part of this two–part label. Medicine packaging can show the right dose and use, long after instructions on boxes and inserts are gone. Rotating label designs can display application charts, and even allow the user to calculate ratios for multi–step preparations. (Dilution, mixing, stages, suitability to task).- 2D Barcodes and wireless transmitter barcodes. New changes in the standards for barcodes now allow for scans in two directions, not just one. One way to use this would be for checkout of software with unique serial number — scan one axis and the UPC identifier registers item and price. Scan the second axis of the barcode and the unique serial number of that unit can call up an instant registration procedure. Special bioreactive inks which, for example, detect food spoilage and cross out the bar code so it will not scan at checkout, alerting the cashier.
- Package Design Tip #233: Rethink logos with data smog in mind. Supplement inventory system friendly part numbers with user centered icons. This way, time spent browsing a confusing array of infrequently purchased printer cartridges would then use the human’s superior visual memory. Something like #7844-9183a means little when a shopper only knows the printer model name. A common graphic element between equipment logo and consumable would save time, quickly identifying the right part. A related Design Crux article is Packaging Design Example: Beer.
- Will your next product packaging design save money on the production run? Do you know how information age packaging design can … be an integral part of a coherent product information strategy? …differentiate the product in ways which produce more sales, reduce returns, help users properly understand use? To find out more, contact me at the link below.
Package redesign
eliminates cardboard