Why consumer packaging sucks

I often think that consumer product makers have forgotten that buyers and users don't necessarily have the same needs. In B2B product development, we often devise personas to test our proposed product designs against. A persona is a kind of stand-in or archetype for a group of customers or users. For example, the buyer of the company's email solution is someone in IT while the users are all of the employees. The buyer wants the right features at the right price. The users are unaware of the price, but they want the features and they also want the product to be usable.

Consumer product packaging these days is designed for two jobs only. It's designed to promote the product (see this great internal Microsoft video analyzing their own packaging foibles) and it's designed to protect against loss (through breakage, leakage, spoilage or theft) prior to the sale. It is not designed with the user in mind. Here are a few of my favorite examples of packaging that defeats the most basic attempts at using the product.

• My 7-year old likes these pre-packed meals called "Lunchables." They are incredibly bad for her but once in a while when we're at the store and she asks, I buy one for her. We get the package home and she can't, for the life of her, open it. Firstly, the glue they use to hold the box together is stronger than the cardboard it's made of, so instead of opening where it's supposed to, the box consistently shreds in inconvenient spots. Secondly, inside the box is a plastic tray sealed with more plastic that must be peeled back by hand without any overhang to get a grip on. This layer is needed to keep the food from falling through the holes in the front of the box designed to show off the food inside. That wouldn't be too bad except that underneath that plastic layer, each individual component of the meal inside is separately sealed in its own plastic bag. These inner plastic bags are tough, too. I can't get it open for her with my hands and have to resort to scissors or a knife. The whole point of Lunchables is that they are supposed to be portable and all of the food can be eaten without utensils. But you can't actually get at the food without tools. Usability of the packaging has been sacrificed to presentation and security.
  
• My daughter is also fond of those foil juice packs that come in Lunchables and that a lot of kids drink from. They're fine to drink from (if you avoid the kind that's almost 100% sugar) but getting the straw into them can be messy. They have a penetrable spot the straw is supposed to go into. Trouble is, using enough force to penetrate that spot almost always causes the straw to pierce the opposite side of the pack. So you end up with a leaky pack - not something my particular 7-year-old is fond of. Neat packaging idea. Not usable in practice.
  
• And as long as I'm on juice, plastic bottles of apple juice seem like a sensible, non-breakable idea until you try to open one. Several times, I have had to get out the pliers to break the grip the screw-top lids have on these bottles. I imagine at one time looser lids must have come off or leaked, but the answer can't be requiring tools or small arms to open them once you've gotten them home.
  
• I think I know why CDs are so impossible to open. I assume it's so they are difficult to open in the store and steal. Couldn't they invent a security system, though, that keeps losses down while not necessitating 5 minutes with an exacto knife to get your purchase out of the box when you get it home? I bought a tool that's actually designed to open CD packaging easily (so you know I'm not the only nut who has this problem). It worked okay, but I still had to peel off several plastic tape fragments with my fingernails.
  
• The worst case I've seen yet of a manufacturer going to great lengths to make something look good in the store and be impossible to unpack at home is those miniature doll-and-a-zillion-little-accessories kits both of my daughters are obsessed with. To display the doll and all of the little doodads that come with it (50% of which are lost within the first hour), the package has an open front. To keep all of that stuff from leaving the store without being paid for, the manufacturers have devised a diabolical web of invisible attachments. The dolls and any large accessories (such as furniture) are actually held in place by thin plastic-coated wires. These wires encircle the item in front and are tied together in the back, passing through the decorative cardboard backing. Behind the cardboard these wires are hand-twisted dozens of times. Some person on the other side of the earth is being paid less than a dollar a day to sit and twist these wires over and over again, dozens of times by hand. They are also paid, it seems to use scotch tape to hold everything else down. Reams and reams of it. I paid $15 for this toy and have to spend half an hour undoing all of this manual labor. At my pay rate, the time I spent unwrapping the toy for my daughter cost me more than the toy!

Tell me your packaging horror stories. Let's collect them all and maybe consumer product makers will start listening!

Comments

[Bruce McCarthy]

Here are some other examples from around the web.

http://www.winmatrix.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=10586
Someone seems to think Microsoft's Vista packaging is good because it keeps the discs safe. Sort of like a (much larger than necessary) jewel case.

http://bigmarketing.wordpress.com/2006/09/25/product-packaging-that-packs-a-punch/
From the questionable creativity department, comes vodka packaged in a glass AK-47.

http://www.geardigest.com/2006/08/09/who_designed_this_crap/
Photos of poorly designed impenetrable blister packs and some well-designed ones as well.

[Chris]

Food packaging is frequently terrible, especially when, as you mention, the closure is stronger than the package itself. I've lost count of the number of zipper-seal plastic bags of shredded cheese whose plastic has torn long before the zipper thought of opening, or of how many Cheerios have been liberated around my kitchen because the bag inside the box rips apart before I can open its firmly glued top.

[Sarah]

I think the problem is the greed of the producers. If they simply spent a bit more money in the strength of the resealing properties in packaging the consumer would be more inclined to be loyal to the product. As it stands now, they are leaving it up to companies like Sealerz to provide packaging solutions for the consumer. I end up using those Sealerz to close up products that should have proper resealing options in the first place. Since people don't bother using clunky machines to reseal bags, they leave it up to these Sealerz tape tabs to do the job. At least there's something out there.

[Bruce McCarthy]

A resealable bag of chips (that actually worked) would save me from many a stale chip. Great idea. (I'm too lazy to get out a twistie or something similar.)

[Kelly Goetsch]

On Friday I heard a great episode of NPR's Science Friday...it delt with the issue of more user-friendly and 'green' packaging. Have a listen at http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2007/Jul/hour2_071307.html.

[Packlab.]

Why consumer packaging sucks

We still have two design fields working usually separately from each other. Product designer work on structure and Graphic Designers on graphics and marketing working on strategy. Still in many leading design consultancies these individuals work separately...and we wonder why packaging fails and lets us down. Packaging Design is a design discipline in its own right. Not everyone is aware of that or is celebrating that enough. We have education programmes and design educated specialists in industry, but we just don't have enough of them...but that is changing slowly. There are only around 15 packaging design programmes in the whole world. Only one full-time packaging design programme in the whole of the US and we know how they consume.

So you could argue consumer packaging sucks because the support for packaging design education sucks!

http://www.packlab.eu

[LD]

Why do they put cream cheese in that stupid foil wrapper? They can put regular cream cheese in a tub - with a lid - it doesn't have to be whipped to be put in a tub.

Why do crackers come in those sleeves. You can't close them. If you leave them open, you have stale crackers.

Why does some bread come in cellophane? When you open it, there's nothing to put the bread back into (must be in cahoots with the ZipLoc bag people).

Why do some of those seal things on bottles and jars not have the little tab thing so you can pull it off.

My biggest one is who the hell invented those blister packs for medication. Put the pills in a damn jar.

Why do english muffins come in that silly little box? Just put them in a bag, so the package isn't so big once you eat half the muffins.

Wouldn't it be cool if all jars that were the same size were standard and had interchangeable lids. Then when you save the jars, you wouldn't have to look for the lid that fits.

I wish they would stop putting cheese in those supposedly re-sealable zipper thingy bags. I've never gotten one of them to work.

Why don't they put ice cream in plastic tubs instead of flimsy cardboard.

Who puts all those little pins in men's dress shirts? What purpose does that serve? I always get a pin prick in one of my fingers and get blood on the damn shirt. Who does that anyway? Are there a bunch of people sitting in the factories putting the pins in?

Why do hot dogs come in packages of 10 and buns come in packages of 8? You think the two manufacturers could possibly get together and coordinate this for us.