Rants of a Product Designer
I despise whatever conniving Marketing genius at Procter & Gamble decided that Dawn Direct Foam would be the next big advancement in dishwashing technology. Remember in recent past when all the liquid dish soap brands started advertising their products as "concentrated" (with little obvious change to the soap itself...just smaller bottle size)? Now it seems they've actually gone the other way, diluting the soap with water so that it can be turned to fluffy foam before it touches your sponge. And they put such a spin on it, it disgusts me.
Of course, the idea of a foam-dispensing pump is not all that bad. I appreciate the neat hand soap that comes from such an invention. For this, we thank the engineers. But I do not appreciate the bright bulbs in Engineering who designed Dawn's blasted pump, the spring of which cannot overpower the pump's internal friction. What do I mean by this? Well, you push the pump down to dispense foam onto your sponge. And then the pump just sits there. Stuck at the bottom. You literally have to pull it back up in order to depress the pump a second time. And you need to depress it that second time, and five more times after that, because each pump action yields about enough foam to clean one tine on a fork. This is hardly product improvement, if you ask me.
This irritates me to no end at work, where all we have in our kitchenette is this Direct Foam crap. I've seriously contemplated calling up the P&G consumer hotline just to complain, but then I remember that I also contribute to the design of a product, the end-user experience of which often leaves something to be desired. Whoops. And so I'll just shut up and appreciate the choice of colors that Dawn used for their Lime Surge variety of Direct Foam. There, I said something nice.
You know, though, there's a difference between "leaves something to be desired" and "fails to perform its core function" which, for the soap dispenser, is to dispense soap. Also, the whole idea behind foam soaps started (or at least I first saw it) in hand-washing, where the foam helped lathering and decreased waste. When it comes to washing dishes, though, you want something that a sponge will absorb to some extent so that it will produce its own foam as you wash. The liquid soaps do this well enough already. I think the foam pump might only stand to be an improvement in the washing-with-brushes arena. I say it's just a marketing gimmick.
ReplyDeleteDear Lungster,
ReplyDeleteNeed I remind you of the disastrously painful grapefruit flavored dishwashing solution? =P
palmolive HOLLAAAAAA
I hate to tell you but we have the same stuff in our kitchenette and the pump goes up all by itself..... yours is just defective. ;)
ReplyDeleteOMG I thought I was the only one who thought foaming handsoap was the stupidest thing since the pogo stick! I grew up using real Dawn, the kind that you can't possible take a small enough amount of, and that takes you a full minute of rubbing your hands together under the running water to get all the soap off. This way, your hands feel clean when you are finished. Foaming handsoap is made for those people who are too good to get their hands good and dirty, and I think it is the devil!
ReplyDeleteDokes - Good points! Agreed.
ReplyDeleteDear Howie C,
Well, of course the grapefruit scented dishwashing liquid was painful IF YOU DRANK IT.
Sarah - Why do you taunt me? >:|
Kelsey - Hilarious.
But waitaminit...aren't product designers supposed to live and die on end user experience and feedback?
ReplyDelete