A Lesson in Half-Design
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
There is an interesting article in the Chicago Tribune this morning regarding a new milk jug that has just been rolled out to Wal-Mart and Costco. I won’t get into all the specifics of what’s good and bad about the introduction – but suffice to say that the product designers had one customer in mind: Milk producers and distributors.
Whether you’ve realized it or not, milk is expensive to ship, and a lot of that expense has been dictated by the type of plastic container that’s typically been used for a gallon of milk. Because of the shape, it is not possible to stack for shipment, thus requiring crates. These crates carry a lot of unused space and that increases the inefficiency of transporting milk cheaply. With fuel cost rising and food cost increasing as well, making successful cost savings to packaging can have a big impact. In fact, the new jugs lower the cost of a gallon of milk from $2.58 a gallon to $2.18 (a savings of just over 15%). Not only that, the new design has cut labor in half and water use (for cleaning the crates which birds love to roost in) by 60 to 70 percent. So, lower fuel use, lower water use, cheaper to purchase, and more convenient to stack and store. What’s not to like?
Well, for one thing, it doesn’t work for the customer.
It seems that the jug is extremely difficult to pour from and almost impossible for children to use. Costco even has a representatives demonstating the use of the jug in store who informs shoppers that the correct pouring technique is a “rock-and-pour instead of a lift-and-tip.” Shoppers are not convinced.
Of course with any big change to a common product there will be initial resistance to adoption. But the issue that I find interesting and all too common is that it was obvious that a large amount of effort was put into redesigning an artifact that affects a great deal of people. But, as is all too often the case, the goal of the design was short-sighted. Milk producers pretty much nailed the design requirements for stacking, transport, and resource savings. But did anyone consider those that need to actually use the product that is being shipped? It seems impossible that the designers, or even those who sponsored the change, didn’t try to use the jug themselves. So it appears that it was decided that if anyone needed to compromise on usability, it would be the people who had to use the jug day to day.