A Wal-Mart lançou nos EUA um novo formato de galão de leite visando uma redução de custos como armazenamento e transporte e, conseqüentemente, reduzindo o custo final ao consumidor.

Só que o novo formato, cheio de vantagens para a logística, é um incômodo para o consumidor. Tanto que o Wal-Mart teve que criar aulas de como utilizar o novo galão.

Saiba mais lendo o artigo abaixo(inglês).

Via Jakob Nielsen e New York Times.

REDESIGNING THE MILK JUG

You might think that the humble milk gallon jug were a tired and
well-established design that cannot be improved further. Wrong, as proven
by Sam’s Club (disclosure: one of our consulting clients, but not for
their milk bottles).

A new design (written up in the New York Times) has the following
impressive improvements in business metrics:

* 180% higher utilization of coolers
* 125% better delivery truck productivity
* 50% increased storage space utilization
* 16% lower milk prices for the end consumer

> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/business/30milk.html

Sadly, the new design comes with a usability problem: people tend to spill
the first time they pour milk from the new container. The store has a kind
of training program in the form of in-store demos to teach customers how
to pour milk.

I haven’t done any studies of the new containers, so I don’t know if it
would have been possible to design them better and avoid this new-user
problem. I do know that consumer packaging tends to be designed without
usability research, so it’s quite likely that further improvements could
be had.

In any case, the point remains that huge business improvements came from
redesigning something as simple as milk containers. Think of the relative
complexity of your website vs. a milk bottle, and you’ll see why the
potential for even bigger ROI remains to this day for Web usability. There
are still enormous value improvements to be squeezed out of the average
online sales funnel.

As an aside, the NY Times article referenced above comes with a
“multimedia” show of the new milk jugs, but unfortunately this is just a
slide show of still photos. Pouring milk with and without spilling is
something that would be much better visualized by a short video clip. They
missed an opportunity to properly webize that article.

Slideshow da matéria:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/06/29/business/milk-jug3/index.html

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