Everyday UI Critique: Dr. Bronner’s Soap
I’m a daily user of a soap brand called Dr. Bronner’s, a multi-purpose organic liquid soap that can be used for almost anything — washing hands, cleaning dishes, and even, according to the Internet, as a substitute for toothpaste (though I must admit I have no inclination to try this anytime soon!).
The product itself is fantastic — I would recommend it to anyone. The bottle and label design, however, are a different matter:
As you can see, the label on this soap is not for the faint of heart — it is packed, not just with the ingredients and instructions on suggested use, but also (according to Wikipedia) with moral and religious promotional material. Now, if the product-relevant information and promotional language were clearly compartmentalized, this would be less of an issue; however, no such separation is immediately apparent.
Initially, one might surmise that information on a white background color was product-related, since the ingredients and warnings are found on the white box in the center. However, the white box on the right contains a mix of marketing materials and (in my opinion) complete gibberish:
Conversely, not all of the orange background text is promotional language:
From the image above, we see that the top part contains more esoteric promotional language while the center part gives helpful instructions for different use cases — in spite of the fact that both have the same formatting.
Beyond the extreme difficulty in finding relevant information on the label, I think the bottle itself is not particularly well designed. Unlike most other liquid soaps, which use a “pump” or “squeeze” mechanism to more accurately control how much soap is dispensed, Dr. Bronner’s simply has a plastic screw-on cap with a fairly large hole in the middle of it:
The problems with this design are twofold. First, there is no regulation of how much soap comes out of the bottle, so I often pour out way more soap than I need. Second, for ordinary tasks such as washing hands, the design is unnecessarily cumbersome, since it requires the user to pick up the bottle and open the cap, turn it over with care (to hopefully prevent too much soap from coming out), and then put the bottle back and close the cap.
Given the seemingly self-apparent issues with this design, it is a natural inclination to ask why the company still uses it. Well, according to Wikipedia (again), this is due to good old-fashioned tradition — Dr. Bronner’s was founded in 1948 by Emanuel Bronner, and while Mr. (or is it Doctor?) Bronner himself died in 1997, his family (who now runs the soap business) has vowed his designs and labels will not change.
As for what Emmanuel Bronner was optimizing for in his design, it is as much a guessing game as anything, though there are a couple good aspects to it. Compared to a pump design, the simple bottle cap likely has less manufacturing costs, which 70 years ago were a much larger concern than they are today (due to economies of scale, automation, etc.). In addition, the bottle’s unusual labeling, for all its flaws in comprehensibility, certainly stands out on the shelf from other soap products.
From a pure UI standpoint, though, this design leaves a lot to be desired, as discussed at length above. The solution I propose is nothing radical, but simply an application of existing standards in liquid soap bottle design: a pump mechanism (to facilitate easier and more controlled dispensing of soap) and an easy-to-read and far less excessive label (to highlight the ingredients and relevant instructions):
