Choosing a cover for a new personal care stick

The question

If a cover damages the stick as it comes off, a new product can look faulty before anyone has tried it.

The brand’s design team had developed alternative covers to make breaking the seal more intuitive. It needed to know which people could remove most easily, which they liked, which did the least damage, and whether people would follow an instruction on the pack first.

Our approach

Opening a pack is a habit over in seconds, so we watched people do it and filmed every opening, as well as asking what they thought.

Regular users of the brand’s stick opened every cover, with the original as the control, and we photographed each stick afterward. From how people judged the damage, we built a spectrum for judging it.

We kept the two questions apart. A second phase filmed regular stick users opening and applying an unbranded prototype with the instruction, judged against the same spectrum, so the instruction could be read on its own.

What the team came away with

The packaging design team had a film of every cover being opened, photographs of the damage each left, and the spectrum for judging damage.

With them came our read of both phases, written for the team’s choice of cover and instruction. The spectrum was built to be used again, so future designs could be judged the same way.