Showing posts with label laundry detergent. Show all posts
Showing posts with label laundry detergent. Show all posts
Saturday, January 16, 2010
(Updated with Solution - TIDE) The designers of this Gain detergent container obviously didn't read Don Norman's "The Design of Everyday Things" !
The designers who created the Gain detergent container below obviously didn't read "The Design of Everyday Things."
No matter which way you try to pour the darn thing, laying it on the side or trying to pour from the spout, it still makes a BIG mess. How would you explain this to your kid?
To put the container on the side, I have to put most of it on my dryer. I often have laundry on the top of my dryer that is in the process of being folded, so to out the Gain container on its side, I have to move the clean laundry.
Although I prefer Gain over Tide, I went back to Tide. One look at the container and you intuitively know what to do.
RELATED
Don Norman's Website
UPDATES
I received the following comment to this this post, plus a few others:
"The black cap is an airvent, not a pouring spout. You stand the container on its side and use the white spout to dispense the liquid using the red rubber button."
I DID use the little red button to dispense the detergent, and I set the container on its side. It didn't work very well.
Here is my response to the first comment:
Here is my response to the first comment:
True, the spout may be an air vent, but as a person who has been doing laundry since I was about 10, and for a family of four for a couple of decades, this set up was NOT intuitive. It just doesn't flow.
I'm usually in a rush when I do laundry, so I did not spend time inspecting the detergent container closely. When I had difficulty pumping the detergent out of the container using the red button, I noticed I the arrow on the "spout" pointing to the cap. I presumed that the arrow meant that I should use the spout to pour the detergent, if the little pump thing didn't work. So that's what I did!
I'm accustomed to using all sorts of cleaning products, and this one was not a good fit.
My point is this:
Getting detergent from a container into a washer should not be this complicated.
It wasn't easy to get the container of Gain down from the shelf above the washer and gracefully put it on its side to use the pump to get the detergent in the cup. The container is pretty heavy when full, as it holds 170 fl oz of detergent, well over a gallon. And there are more problems. After you get the into the cup and then into the washer, the next step is to rinse out the cap. This takes a long time, since the consistency is very thick. (I don't have a sink in my laundry room, so I use the water that is in the washer.)
The container pouring system needs to be simple.
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