The New New Nutrition Label

At long last the nutrition label is getting a makeover, thanks in part to the First Lady. As someone interested in health and nutrition, I'm pretty excited. As an up and coming user experience professional I can't help but think, "what will this be like for the consumer?"  

Including "added sugars" is a big deal because up till now it's been hard to tell where a product's sugar is coming from. Fruit has sugar in it. Plain yogurt has sugar in it. So it will be nice to know how much of the sugar in your strawberry yogurt comes from strawberries and yogurt, vs. corn syrup or cane sugar. 

But I still believe that for the average consumer, context is missing. A typical American has no idea how much a gram is. We can't picture 10 grams of protein or 20 grams of sugar, which makes it difficult to understand what we're really eating. It's not all the metric system's fault though; I don't think we'd understand 0.35oz any better. The amounts of nutrients in a single serving are just too small to visualize. 

When I read a nutrition label I'm less interested in the amount of each nutrient than the proportion of nutrients. It's interesting and helpful to understand that by weight almonds are 50% fat, and about 20% protein. And if somebody saw that what they were about to eat was 50% sugar they might think twice. There are limitations to this, to be sure. A can of coke is 355ml, which is roughly 355 grams. It contains 39g of sugar so it is only about 11% sugar by weight, which doesn't seem so bad. But almost all of the other 89% is water, and there are no other nutrients besides that sugar.

Below is a mock-up I have been thinking about for a while. It's not perfect but it could help people better understand what they are eating, which to me is the whole point of the nutrition label to begin with. What do you think?

What the world needs now is em pa-thy

I've been thinking lately that government could use a dose of design, namely two concepts: empathy, and prototyping.

Empathy

Imagine a world where our leaders (and citizens-at-large, for that matter) were interested in hearing what each other had to say, and not just so they could disagree or prove each other wrong. If they were to say things like "how could this work?" "What do you mean?" "Tell. Me. More."

There's no time quite like the heart of a US Presidential election cycle to experience the exact opposite of empathy and curiosity. People are so certain their views are correct, whether or not they have any qualifications. I don't know about you, but I'm incredulous about certainty regardless of who it's coming from.

Prototyping

Government is designed to be slow, and that's a good thing. We don't want it to be too easy to change because we need stability, and time for policies to have their intended effect. The checks and balances of government exist to make change hard, but lost in the caution is the lesson so many businesses are learning--that sometimes you just have to try something, see what happens, and adjust. When change becomes so hard that it is virtually impossible, it may be time to rethink the system. 

Easier said than done. But how might we create ways to experiment at a national level in service of finding the best possible solutions to our problems? What would an agile government look like? What would a minimum viable product look like when it comes to economic stimulus, welfare, or social policies? 

UPDATE, MAY 21 2016
Members of the conservative media recently visited Facebook to discuss any potential political bias on the site. While I don't agree with him often, Glenn Beck's recounting of the experience is a great example of how empathy and a willingness to not know can further a conversation. There is nothing to fight with in his story; it is of a man trying to understand the truth by looking through everyone's eyes. Thank you Glenn. I hope people on both sides of the aisle continue to think more like this.