A lid design

Couple months ago, I got an oral medicines to treat my ulcer.  I am satisfied with it’s job, except the design of it’s lid. Let’s take a look at the pictures below first. 

                                          

                                

And yes, it’s about the lid. How do we usually screw the lid?The large opening or small one? Since I bring up the question, I believe most people will say: well, I think the first pic is the correct way. It’s right, and I learned it when I made my first mistake. But the weird thing is even I really know it, I still make the mistake in the second picture……..almost every time. Is it about my memory? Probably not. I  believe most people would have the same experience as me. So the question is why do we still commit the same mistake again and again, even though we already know the correct answer? So far I could think of two possible reason.

  • affordance . Which means people can use their innate tendency to use the product in a correct way without any external instruction or training. Just like people believe “up” is “open” , “down” is “close”,  “large” may has a better representation in “cover” than “small”.
  • consistency. Most of the market products like this medicine use the “large” opening to screw the lid. So users are easily to follow the existing design and apply their “common sense” to this different design.

So if ask which design I like, I would still stick to the usual design, because I believe it follows my metaphor for a lid.

Useful vs usable Which one goes first?

Useful vs usable

Which one goes first?