Empathy test

 Empathy test of an arthritis user with the honey packaging, by using cloth padding to simulate the swelling and inflexible movement of the hand, fingers and thumb. Actions perfomed were gripping and squeezing. Two different type of packaging used are, PET squeeze bottle and Plastic laminated-layered squeeze-tube.

With the thick padding the grip on the container was an unnatural feel to the hand ergonomic, and made it an uncomfortable grip-hold. I find that I need to use more grip strength, because I want to bend more of the fingers and I was trying to stretch my fingers for better grip, but I could not do that because of the obstructive padding.

 Without the padding, the design of the container is very comfortable to grip by the hand. Visually by the photos here, I can see the difference of the grip diameter of the un-padded hand and the padded one. And also the placement of the fingers were in different position.

 With this tube packaging and testing with the unpadded hand and without, gave the same result as the first test. But this type of packaging is more comfortable to grip with the padded hand compared to the previous PET container.

 The testing of the flip opening of the lid is easier on the tube (left), with very minimal strength need to be used. A comment made by my class peer said the palm of the hand can even open the flip cap.
The flip cap on the PET container (right) requires more strength to open and the palm of the hand cannot open the cap, as it did with the tube.

The PET plastic is a tougher material and harder to squeeze or press to dispense the content. My experience with this product, it was easy to use and dispense the honey when the container is full. The action to get the honey is still do-able when it is half-filled. But it was only really hard to get near-empty honey that was left in the container.

The laminate-tube have solved this problem. However the geometry of this tube is more cylindrical and the smooth surface may prove more risk of slip from the hand grip of an arthritis.

My reading from the Australian Packaging Covenant, reported packaging design should avoid cylindrical design, and instead to adopt elliptical and have corners to offer better grip and reduce the risk of slipping/dropping the bottle/container.

What I like about these packaging design is the upside down standing, to make easier dispensing of the high viscosity honey.

I find that both products have packaging sealing problem and I think they would not benefit the arthritis.
They used the aluminium foil with very small surface edge for fingers to grip, and the external seal has a large surface area, which requires a user to a tool to cut away the excess, or the user have to peel the whole seal off, that contains all the labelling and texts, and this would require unnecessary actions and frustrations.

The above image can show that the PET plastic (right) are some ripping on the labels because I have used a pair of scissors to cut away the top seal from the rest.