If you can’t use your head, use your finger instead.

I’ve been unreasonably haunted by this Reddit post for a long while now. I remember when I first saw it, and I struggled to comprehend how the person posting the picture could not comprehend what it was they were actually sharing. The gist of the original post was admiringly titled “The way this Dutch company makes the biscuits easier to pick them up.” While technically not wrong, the image on the right where the person is using the notch to hold the biscuit more securely (?) is not the innovative breakthrough they think it to be. To me, it is clear that the notch in the biscuit is designed to make it easier to remove it from the packaging sleeve. But then I realized that the person posting this is probably not from a part of the world where biscuits are regularly sold this way. Hence their amaze/amusement with the notch. Assuming this person comes from a country where cookies are sold in trays or boxes that make it easy to remove individual items without much required manual dexterity, seeing something like this for the first time would be hard to intuit. However, were this person from a place where biscuits were sold in tightly wrapped cellophane-covered stacks that required a bit more wrangling to coax the individual items from the confines of their package, the need for, and indeed brilliance of, the notch itself would be crystal clear. The point is that good design is not always universal. For the actual intention to be obvious, context is often required. Not that the misinterpreted detail causes any diminished outcome. In fact, it was deemed interesting enough to be worthy of posting to Reddit after all! Of course, there is one other potential rationale that makes any favorable interpretation moot. Perhaps, and this is the design cynic in me talking right now, the actual benefit to the biscuit manufacturer is not an improved customer experience but rather a marginal reduction in the amount of product they have to include in each package. While necessity may be the mother invention, capitalism is quite often the father.