Use Case Scenario
The relevant user journey can be sub divided into several stages.
The User Journey
Purchasing Phase
This is the phase where the user seeks out a ketchup to purchase. For someone with reduced grip strength it is likely that they will have focus on how easy the bottle looks to handle. They could also look for weight and the type of cap the bottle has.
Opening Phase
At this stage the user first opens the bottle. The seal need to be taken off and the cap has to be twisted off in order to do that. These can both be difficult tasks for someone who has weak grip.
Portioning Phase
The user will aim to squeeze out the right amount of ketchup on their plate. They will have to hold the bottle and must easily be able to portion their amount of ketchup.
*Visualizations have been made to portray how someone's experience might be before the redesign and after.*
Design Justification
The aim of this redesign is to make the classic Heinz ketchup bottle more inclusive by making it easier to handle for people with reduced grip strength, while retaining Heinz’s classic look. In other words, actions like pinching or gripping should be altered to be as easy as possible. To achieve this, the usability of some key points needs to be improved upon.
The Cap
The cap is the most important since it requires the most handling during the use of a ketchup bottle. One needs to twist the cap in order to remove the seal, so this is already a crucial step in the process. After, the opening of the cap should be possible for someone with a weaker grip too.
To make it easier to open the cap, it was decided to make the hole in which one can put the finger slightly bigger, but more importantly deeper. Making it deeper reduces the moment required to open the cap without the chance of it opening by accident increasing. It also gives the user a bigger part to hold onto. Next to this, the opening part of the cap sticks out a little bit from the rest of the cap. This makes it possible to not even use your fingers but use the side of a table or any other flat surface to open the cap. Since the bottle itself sticks out over this point, the top surface area is not increased. This causes the bottle to still be easily shipped in larger numbers. All these positive points are easy design changes to implement without changing too much about the original design of Heinz.
The Seal
Removing the seal of the ketchup bottle is one of the trickier steps of handling the bottle. In the original design of the Heinz ketchup bottle, the seal was outfitted with a flap, that when pinched, could be used to pull off the seal. To reduce the pinch strength needed to open the seal, it was decided to add a hole in the middle, where the user can hook their finger through to remove it. This is a small change, with a relatively big effect on the accessibility to users with reduced pinch strength.
The Grip
The smooth sides of the original ketchup bottle look nice aesthetically. However, it can be hard to grasp if you do not have full strength over your fingers. Adding slight finger indents with a grippy texture can already help a lot with this. Other than just helping with grip, it also signals to customers that the bottle is optimized for ease of use. This makes it easy for people who are looking for such a bottle to spot.
The Label
The newly added grip indents on the bottle overlap with the placement of the original back label. Therefore, the label on the back containing the nutritional information should be put somewhere else. The label will now be placed on the sides of the bottle. It will be split so that one side shows the ingredients, and the other side shows the nutritional information. This label placement will also bring extra attention to the grip patch on the back because it will make it more visible, making sure it communicates that it’s there to the customers.
This new placement of the label will likely require a slight change in the production line of Heinz will introduce some added costs which will be investigated further in depth in the cost benefit analysis.
How does this fit with Heinz?
Like previously mentioned, Heinz is a very recognizable and global brand with a wide variety of different products. This bottle with not only have to earn its place along the other product Heinz offers but also fit into it.
These are the ketchup bottles Heinz currently offers; there are different versions of the longer bottles and the same accounts for the smaller bottles. Our bottle will be another slight variation on the smaller bottle (bottles on the right). From the front view the bottle will look close to the same as the other bottles. It will not look out of place and will be instantly recognizable as Heinz. On the back is where things will get more interesting, our grip patch will communicate to customers that this bottle is more user friendly, and it will offer an even better user experience. In conclusion our bottle will be sufficiently different to offer a new experience to customers while still feeling like an original Heinz ketchup bottle.
Early Concept Designs
A Button
In early concepts a portioning button was included. This would make sure that regardless of the strength input the same amount of ketchup would always come out. This however was later decided to be scrapped from the final bottle due to concerns of the producibility of the idea. There were concerns that once pressed the button would not return to its original shape. Next to this the volume of ketchup the button would cause to come out would likely be very little, and there was even a chance that it would just expand the bottle slightly, meaning that no ketchup would be ejected at all.
Figure 1: Early Concept Image
Conical Cap
As can be seen in the early concept image, the cap initially featured conical design. This design would make sure that the last bits of ketchup would flow more easily to the end of the cap. This was later scrapped however, because it made the mold design too complicated to finish in time for this project. We think that it wouldn’t add a significant amount of costs to the production method. So this is potentially something that could be looked further into in the future.