O impacto das cores e das formas de embalagens de alimentos na experiência do usuário

Abstract

Understanding the user more deeply and their experience with objects is crucial for design, since from this knowledge it is possible to design focusing on specific needs. With this purpose, they must understand how people, through perception, will come into contact with products, and what that encounter will be like. Not only is the product itself important for the experience. Packaging is the first contact the user will have with it, and research shows that packaging’s color and shape may increase the preference for a specific product. With this in mind, this research has as a general objective to measure the impact of the tangible variables of packaging - shape and color - in the user experience. For this, an experimental design was used, counting on two studies. The first one manipulated two independent intragroup variables, shape (rounded and angular) and color (gray scales, warm colors and cool colors), and the dependent variables of preference and flavor associations, with a sample of fifty people. For it, packaging without product identification were used. The results indicated that color is more significant than shape for the studied variables, with no difference between warm and cool, with the gray having much lower averages when compared to the other two. About the flavors, there was no significant effect for shape, while color was significant in all of them, except in the bitter taste. In the second experiment, three independent variables were manipulated, also intragroups: shape (rounded and angular), color (warm and cool scales) and type of product (buttery biscuit and cereal). As dependent variables, the perception of how healthy a product appears to have been measured, as well as preference, with a sample of one hundred and two people. In this experiment, more realistic packaging images were used, containing the product identification. As results for preference, the color was significant, with the cool ones having higher averages, as well as the type of product, with the butters presenting higher averages. Regarding how healthy a product appears to be, all the independent variables had significant effects, with the angular, cool and buttery packages presenting higher averages when compared to the others.