Transforming User Experience of Nutrition Facts Label - An Exploratory Service Innovation Study

Abstract

Nutrition facts label is an important tool for consumers to get information regarding servings, calories and nutrients in a packaged food product. Previous research shows that nutrition labels are generally confusing and difficult to use. Nutrition information in the label can be transformed into dynamic feedback to make nutrition facts labels easy to use and helpful in making healthy decisions. In this research, we created a decision support system using a smartphone application that scans the label using OCR, then apply the FDA’s 5-20 rule to determine if a particular nutrient is in healthy amount and visualizes this feedback in either an augmented reality or a static popup format using color-coded thumbs up and thumbs down signs. Our results show that the app significantly helped consumers in making healthy decisions and improved the overall experience of using nutrition facts labels. While our results did not show a significant difference between the impact of augmented reality and static popup feedback on user behavior, they indicated a slightly more favorable reaction toward feedback that used augmented reality.