What Your Trunk Says About You

It's easy to overlook all the thought, research, and deliberation that go into the products we use every day.  Behind the scenes, companies spend millions of dollars trying to understand exactly how customers interact with their products in an effort to help us solve problems we didn't even know we had.  Through surveys, focus groups, and even by simply watching people use products in public, consumer insights analysts, industrial designers, and marketers search for any angle that might give a product an advantage over the competition.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in products targeted at senior citizens.  Let's face it, old people are closed-minded and hateful when it comes to technology--even non-smart phones are too smart and complicated for them.  Back in 2006, one company tried to tear down some of the roadblocks preventing seniors from going cellular with their phone calls, and Jitterbug was born.  The company carefully studied the frequent complains of the elderly when it came to cell phones.  According to the age-challenged, cell phones were too confusing, too hard to read, and had too many buttons.

The Jitterbug phone is one of the most obvious examples of targeting a product at a specific group of consumers.  Aside from the hideous shape, you'll notice that, as the image above points out, the handset is designed with fogies in mind, offering minimal keys for minimal confusion, and giant, back-lit buttons for those with sub-par peepers.  Thanks to this simple but effective bit of consumer research, we now face the very real risk of old people texting and driving.  Fantastic!

Yet another example comes from the growing but apparently underserved market of seniors.  What's one of the first things that comes to mind when you think about old people?  Medication, of course--they have to have their pills!  And the first image that pops into my head when I think about medication is the generic, orange prescription bottle:

It's as old as time, but even the classic, simple prescription bottle wasn't entirely meeting the needs of its users.  Research indicated that seniors had trouble opening the bottle, struggled to read the small font on the cylindrical container, and occasionally took the wrong pills entirely...sometimes with deadly consequences.  A design student, working on her thesis project, overhauled the old bottle; with the help of an industrial designer, ClearRx hit the pharmacy sheves at Target stores across the country:

The name of the medication is printed in huge font at the top of the bottle, the label is presented on a flat, easy-to-read surface, and each bottle has its own uniquely-colored ring to help the medically-challenged quickly identify the correct bottle.  You can't see it in the picture, but a recent twist on the ClearRx bottle includes a detachable magnifying strip that offers the super visually-impaired even more label-reading assistance.  It's a simple yet brilliant idea.  So brilliant, in fact, that the clear Rx bottle received a "Design of the Decade" award in 2010 from the Industrial Designers of America.

Now, for my loyal followers who aren't card-carrying AARP members, here's one more example that anyone can relate to: the iPod.  It's incredible how many of the iPod's features were born out of intense consumer research.  Once again, the concepts are simple, but the design is impressive.  First, Steve Jobs and friends realized that smaller is better when it comes to music players.  And a lot of people listen to music while riding on crowded buses or subways, with one hand busy gripping the overhead bar.

With the iPod Nano, you have an almost impossibly small music and video player--in fact, the picture above is an older generation Nano; the newer versions are less than half the size of the one above.  It fits in a pocket with plenty of room to spare, and with the ingenious scroll wheel, people can take advantage of all the features with a single thumb--that's an incredible feat for a device that can do so many different things.

Now this is where things get interesting.  Before most people buy a new car, they want to take a look under the hood...but do they ever check what's in the trunk? One place people don't often think about industrial design and consumer research is the back of their vehicle.  For the car owners out there--particularly owners of newer models--you may have noticed an odd mechanism dangling from the lid of the trunk that looks something like this:

This has always struck me as odd--it's a glow-in-the-dark trunk release that's on the inside of the trunk.  In the history of the world, I don't think a single person has ever tripped, fallen into a trunk, and had the lid shut on them.  Now, I know what you're thinking: the trunk release is probably designed as an escape for children who are playing around with the trunk and accidentally get trapped.

But what good parent would possibly want this?  On those long (and even the short) road trips, when the kids inevitably start yelling, complaining, or just talking, the only logical thing to do is to stuff them in the trunk.  Why give them a handy, glow-in-the-dark escape route?!  The Malibu predates emergency trunk releases by many years, but if I ever own a car with one of these, the first thing I'll do is bust out the scissors and cut it off.

There's also a silghly different version of the emergency trunk release, and it looks like this:

The first one seemed strange to me, and this one is even more crazy.  As the previous examples illustrated, every little feature in a product is born out of intense consumer research, focused on meeting all those little unmet needs.  So, as the title of this blog post suggests, I ask you to think about what your trunk says about you.  The emergency trunk release may seem insignificant, but it can speak volumes about the market your car's manufacturer was trying to target when it designed the car.

The first trunk release is pretty simple to understand--it was undoubtedly designed with child safety in mind, so you're likely to find that version of the emergency handle in boring family sedans.  The second trunk release requires a little more thought and consideration.  If you look closely, you'll notice that the diagram is clearly not showing a child climbing out of the trunk after an accidental lock-in.  The person in the diagram is taller than the car, so it's an adult...and he's not just climbing out of the trunk, but springing out the trunk and sprinting away from the car like his life depends on it.

I'm not entirely sure how to interpret this, but the only explanation that makes any sense is that auto manufacturers designed this feature for drivers who are likely to get carjacked.  That's the only situation I can imagine where an adult ends up in his trunk, let alone a situation where that adult is leaping out of the trunk and sprinting away from his own car. 

So what does this say about the cars (and their drivers, for that matter) that have trunk release #2 dangling the back?  Perhaps this feature comes standard on cheaper, low-end models that are likely to be purchased by drivers who live in a ghetto.  Perhaps it's a regional thing, and this version of the emergency release is installed as an aftermarket feature by auto dealers in cities like East L.A., Detroit, the south side of Chicago, or East St. Louis.  One thing I know for sure is that no one from the mafia is buying a car with one of these interior trunk releases.

Who knew that something so small could say so much?  Next time you're renting a car, give the trunk a glance--it says a lot about the safety of the area you're visiting.  And if you haven't made a mental note of the trunk release in your own car, give it some thought.  If you're a parent, you'll probably want to have it removed immediately.  If you live in a ghetto...well...you might want to leave that trunk release in place...