Hi Julie, You can take a look at this page for an attempt to introduce something like this in the UK. There's not just percentages, but also a "traffic light"-style color coding scheme. It's currently a purely voluntary scheme and has been adopted by many retailers, whereas others have rejected it and have resisted attempts to make it compulsory. I think it's still a rather political issue...
On the design side, the main problem with using a percentage is that it's only a rough estimation and people's nutritional needs differ. There's also the question of how much people would be deterred by seeing red labels all over their food. Cigarettes have featured health warnings for a long time yet I doubt it's contributed to cutting down smoking. A funny thing is that even some foods considered quite healthy (e.g. fresh orange juice) have had some "red" traffic lights: in the case of the juice it was because of the sugar naturally present in the fruit, and there's actually a footnote saying this, but if you don't notice this then the association of "red flag" with unhealthy food may be eroded. Cheers, Alex On Dec 13, 2007 3:35 PM, lachica <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'll throw this idea out there. I've been thinking about the usability of > nutritional food labeling and thinking there has got to be a better, more > intuitive way to present this. Ideas from talented interaction designers > could really make a difference here. > > A graphical presentation such as bars representing the percentage of daily > values rather than numbers might allow people to more easily see what they > are actually ingesting. > > Also, taking some of the information from Harvard's food research ( > http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/index.html) and breaking the > nutritional data into more useful categories might make sense. > > Thanks, > Julie > > > On Dec 8, 2007 9:49 AM, Michael Tuminello <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Hi all - > > > > I was thinking that the IxDA community has a lot of potential to > > contribute something positive to the world at large, either by > > improving some system that people use for some positive social > > impact, or maybe just making a social issue more visible via better > > information design. > > > > I was wondering if anyone was interested in maybe picking an issue > > and working on it, maybe with the IxDA conference as the target goal > > for having something ready or at least underway. It might even be > > nice for it to be a part of the conference every year... > > > > MT > > > > ________________________________________________________________ > > *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* > > February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA > > Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ > > > > ________________________________________________________________ > > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > > To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe > > List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines > > List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help > > > ________________________________________________________________ > *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* > February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA > Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ > > ________________________________________________________________ > Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! > To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe > List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines > List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help > ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
