Eating with a Conscience: Toward a Visual and Contextual Nutrition Facts Label

Abstract: The large variety of food products available in today’s market is making it increasingly difficult for the diet-conscious consumer to select the appropriate foods to maintain a balanced diet. To assist consumers, we design a visual nutrition facts label that provides the viewer with a quick overview of a food’s nutritional content while presenting them with contextual information that compares it with similar foods. Our core design is based on the bullet graph as it is capable of displaying the level of a nutrient in a food product along with the range of nutrient levels in other similar foods thus providing a context. In our work, we create multiple design variations of our visual nutrition labels based on the bullet graph and test which design is the most preferable and effective.

Teaser: The below shows examples of our linear (left) and radial (right) visual nutrition facts label designs based on the bullet graph. Both labels show the nutritional content of the food ‘Salt & Pepper Hard Cut Genoa Salami’ as well as the range of nutrient levels for all foods in the ‘Salami’ category (dark blue) and the ‘Sausages & Luncheon Meat’ food group (light blue).

Video: Watch it to get a quick overview:

Paper: D. Coelho, H. He, M. Baduk, K. Mueller, “Eating with a Conscience: Toward a Visual and Contextual Nutrition Facts Label,” VisComm: Workshop on Visualization for Communication (jointly held with IEEE VIS), October 25, 2020. PDF | PPT | SUPPL | DEMO