Maggie and I often talk about 'how might we help people make healthier eating choices?' Realizing that nutritional labels and ingredients lists are arguably the most significant insight consumers have into their foods, we started talking about how we could improve the nutritional label and ingredients list.
Sara and I decided to formally tackle this problem.
The first thing we did was a lot of research. We took an in-depth look into the rules and regulations that govern nutritional labels to try and understand why they were made and how they were designed to be used.
Nutritional Information Label promotional content from Health Canada.
Nutritional Label Daily Value promotional material from Health Canada.
One of my first inspirations for a better nutritional label experience was McDonald's custom 'nutritional label' on their Egg McMuffins. McDonald's provides a visual representation of a few main nutrients, and cleverly uses a dashed line to set a benchmark at 1/3 of your daily intake. The misleading nature of this McDonald's example demonstrated to me the potential for nutritional information to be displayed in more intuitive and digestable formats.
Nutritional information graphic on a McDonald's Egg McMuffin wrapper.
Sara and I then dove into requirements gathering. Sara did a use case analysis to develop a list of requirements for a solution to the problem, while I interviewed a wide range of people to gather insights into how nutritional labels were being used and how they could be improved.
After pouring through our findings, Sara and I decided a smartphone-based solution would allow us to deliver the information and insight needed at the exact moment of struggle for the user. We were confident that our targeted users were comfortable enough with the technology to make this route a viable option.
Rough interface sketches to help develop workflows and information architecture.
We're currently going through activities to help us develop a workflow and information architecture that addresses our user's problems. Check in later this year to see how it panned out!
