Drink Cartons, how user-friendly are they?
The handling of packaging of consumables can be a nuisance, especially for the elderly. Motivated by the ageing of the general population, a study was conducted of the usability of 1 liter drink cartons. The research consisted of a usability test with 24 participants, of whom 9 were over 65 years old. The ease of opening, pouring, re-opening and the quality of resealing were investigated for five different types of opening mechanisms: gable top, tear closure, clicking lid, lever closure and screw cap. The results show that especially the elderly have many problems when interacting with the packaging. Some users even fail completely to open certain types of packaging. The proper use of the lever closure is not evident to some users, and most participants use scissors to open a tear closure, while it is intended to be torn by hand. The ideal closure for large carton drink packaging apparently does not yet exist. The closures which, once opened, are easy to pour from (the gable top and the tear closure) are generally not easy to open or to re-close. The lever closure can be resealed reasonably well, but the results show that the initial opening of this closure is difficult. From these observations, guidelines are deduced for the design of user-friendly drink cartons.
Afra Shamshiri Dani(e)l H. Schaefers Annet van Vulpen Brecht J. Daams Daan J. van Eijk
Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, the Netherlands Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, the Netherlands Daams Ergo
国际会议
17th World Congress on Ergonomics(第十七届国际人类工效学大会)
北京
英文
1-7
2009-08-09（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）