Coffee Cup Usability
Originally uploaded by ante10pe
This is a photo of my coffee cup from lunch today. Why is this interesting, you ask?
It’s hard to see from my blurry cameraphone photo, but the text on the top says “Place Cup ↑ Seam Here.”
I checked underneath and there’s no special molding on the underside to combat seam-leakage.
While it’s not earth-shattering, having coffee leak through the seal on account of a seam in the coffee cup is one of life’s little annoyances, right up there with socks bunching up inside your shoe and hangnails. It doesn’t help that the context in which I’m drinking a cup of coffee tends to be power-walking my way to work.
In reality, considering N configurations of how you could affix the lid to the cup, about 5/6N would result in a leak-free experience, and only 1/6N would result in an embarrassing coffee drip down the front of your shirt, or worse yet, on your pants; I estimate about a 60-degree arc flanking the seam to be the ‘danger-zone.’
So, in essence, these instructions of where to place the seam is really nothing but a polite suggestion, albeit it one I could have figured out myself, and often do anyway. This being said, I appreciate that ‘progressive’ folks at Dopaco Foodservice Packaging are looking out for me.
In fact, this makes me want to read the book Nudge, which (to the limited extend I understand what this book is about) talks about how seeminglly insignificant cues can drastically alter individuals’ behaviors.
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