Effective Design and Ineffective Design
The picture on the left is a body lotion bottle I found in my bathroom. The object itself has two very simple purpose: contain the chemical inside and inform people about what it is containing. This bottle does a great job for its first task but a rather poor one for the second. The only place where it indicates that it is a bottle of body lotion is at its bottom, in very small type and very low contract. This design failure creates two problem: 1. it makes it really hard for customers to identity that it is a bottle of body lotion when shopping. 2. It creates the same unpleasant experience when the customer is using it in a shower, when he/she usually doesn’t want to spend a lot of time reading the label.
The bottle on the left convey its message to it user much more effectively. The first thing a user would see by reading the label would be the big “EO”. By making it the only sans serif type on the label, the user can easily understand that it is the logo of the brand, instead of any informative copy. The second thing a user would see is the big “SHAMPOO” in white. With very big type and high contrast, it stand out very easily and there is no way a person can miss it. It makes the product stand out easily among an array of shampoo and body lotion in a store; it would also make the user never mistaken it with any other product that may appear in a shower.
The makers of the first bottle designed the label without the user in their mind. They used most of the space on the label to promote how good the product it while not considering how/when/where a user would user it. In contrast, the makers of the second bottle put one of the most useless information to them on a most important position; however, it is the most important information for the user.
