Four examples of product packaging that had a prominent central design element were chosen for use in this study.
These packages included three packages of pasta – Campanelle, Pipette, and Gemelli – from the Barilla brand, along with a bottle of Izadi red wine (see Fig. 1).
The central images of the pasta, as well as the triangular icon on the front of the wine bottle label, were extracted via photo editing software (the pasta elements were centred within a 105 194 pixel transparent image, whilst the wine
element was centred at the bottom of a transparent image of 58 70 pixels; the wine label itself was 58 51 pixels; see
Fig. 2A).
The empty space these elements left on each package was carefully filled-in in order to match the surrounding packaging.
During the study, the rotatable display element was superimposed onto the original packaging at its original location.
The participant could then rotate the design element around a central point (simply by moving the cursor around this point on the screen see Fig. 2A). The degree of element rotation matched the degree of mouse rotation.
The apparatus varied by participant as the experiment was conducted online.
The experiment utilised ‘full screen’ mode (i.e., utilising the entirety of the participant’s monitor), and took place within a 1024 768-pixel box in the centre of the screen, irrespective of the size of the monitor. The experiment was conducted on
the Internet using the Adobe Flash based version of Xperiment (http://www.xperiment.mobi).