Designing Inclusive Packaging

The user experience can be greatly affected by the demands made by packaging on users' capabilities such as vision and dexterity. Packaging with features that are hard to see, manipulate, or understand can result in difficulty, frustration, or even outright exclusion. This particularly affects older people and those with disabilities, but can also cause problems for more mainstream users. Inclusive design presents a way to address these issues. This chapter outlines the key principles of inclusive design and shows how they apply to packaging, presenting a framework for putting inclusive design into practice. Simulators and personas are then described, as examples of tools that are particularly helpful in inclusive design. These tools can help to develop and explore an understanding of user needs and of the effects of capability loss on the use of packaging. Real-world examples are provided to show how these apply to packaging design in practice.