FROM SEARCH TO BROWSE

It is difficult to read the labeling of food products we buy as we age.

I want to learn about how people read the labeling of foodstuffs.

Research has shown that food labels can be difficult to read and understand, with a great detail of information often included on labels.

Actually, many ingredient lists are are often printed in small, condensed type or in various colors of ink against poor contrasting backgrounds.

Unless you read the entire label, you’re not going to get a true idea of the food’s ingredients and you have to know how to interpret what the label says.

It takes time to review the label and decipher if this item is healthy for you.

The goal of the application is to provide a quick, accurate, and effortless way for people to detect offending ingredients in food products, and thus avoid the tedious and time consuming process of reading and interpreting ingredient labels.

Some changes were made due to heuristic evaluation. The feature for text recognition was put on hold due to this task tends to cause error, specially problematic if you are scanning the food label of a can.

Other feature like search, needed to be developed more thoroughly,

The interface was symplified to see how clear the information provided is.

After testing the application, the first design idea changed, the search feature had usability problems.

The user didn’t know which additives in the food supply were harmless, risky or avoidable.

I decided to change the “search” menu item to a “category menu” item where the user could browse by categories of the additives: safe, caution or avoid.

Also the list of the functions of the additives, once paragraphs, became links.

I asked myself: Can users find food additives on the database provided in the website?

Do users think this website is useful to them?

With user testing I found out the database was too specific and the search feature didn’t work if the exact name of the additive wasn’t introduced.

Conclusion, even the navigation was very simple it was very frustrating for the users. I got thoughts like “I don’t think I am a target audience” or “I wasn’t able to find what I was looking for”

It was easy to find things from the list of three safety code colors: harmless additive, caution additive and avoid additive, but not from the search input, users have to know the additives they are looking for.

So the final design idea has a simple menu of three items: home, help and categories where the homepage gives more information about what the app is about and things are categorized with descriptions.

Now the app assumes that not everybody who lands on the page has prior knowledge.