Step by step and 80/20 rule: the development of our intuitive nutritional value editor

With the 20.09 release, we are launching our new nutritional value editor: A simple and intuitive way of maintaining and adding to your nutritional values within the product data. The development of the nutritional value editor was particularly exciting for everyone involved. The majority of the actors were there for the first time, from the conception and discussion with customers through the development, presentation and testing of a prototype to going live. But it is also fundamentally

With the 20.09 release, we are launching our new nutritional value editor: A simple and intuitive way of maintaining and adding to your nutritional values within the product data. The development of the nutritional value editor was particularly exciting for everyone involved. The majority of the actors were there for the first time, from the conception and discussion with customers through the development, presentation and testing of a prototype to going live. Basically, it is always extremely exciting for me as the person responsible for products to see a feature mature throughout its development path from conception to go-live.

It all starts with customer feedback

After hearing and collecting a lot of feedback, requests and suggestions on the subject of maintaining nutritional values from our users and the various GS1 organizations, we started with a first draft of the nutritional value editor in February of this year. This was nothing more than a sequence of clickable screens, which we were able to use right at the beginning of the process in order to get a feel for first usage tests as to whether our ideas are basically on the right track. Early and regular tests with users not only help to confirm basic assumptions, but also to detect errors in the early development phases before it becomes expensive and time-consuming to fix them. But not only the direct feedback from our customers played a special role this time ...

Data-driven development and the 80/20 rule

When developing the nutritional value editor, we made greater use of our database and consulted it as a basis for decision-making. A colleague at atrify has been supporting us since last autumn, who is primarily responsible for the procurement, organization and analysis of our extensive database. The knowledge that we draw from the data gives us the opportunity to make very targeted decisions about who and for which usage scenarios we want to design.

Our premise at the beginning was that we wanted to provide a feature in accordance with the 80/20 rule that covers most of the use cases and thus offers as many users an advantage as possible without taking up too much time and effort in development . The aim was also to get a usable solution on the road as soon as possible and not keep our users waiting any longer.

Since a wide range of statements about the nutritional values can be derived from the processed data, we first obtained an overview of which nutritional values are most frequently maintained in the product data. An essential, not entirely surprising finding was that 94% of all users in Germany only give the “Big 8”, ie energy information, fat, proteins, carbohydrates, saturated fatty acids, salt and fiber. And the situation is similar in our neighboring countries Holland, Belgium and Austria, only a slightly higher use of fiber can be seen here.

For the design of our nutritional value editor, it therefore meant that an input option in table form with these eight nutritional values is completely sufficient for more than 90% of the applications.

But statements can also be made about other design elements of the editor on the basis of the data. In the end, the user should have it as easy as possible and not have to make any unnecessary entries. For example, on the basis of the data available, we decided not to allow any selection for the measurement accuracy, since 94% only APPROXIMATELY (approximately) was used here anyway.

We also derived the decision for the available columns - for 100g, the portion information and the percentage of the recommended daily amount for both sizes - from the data. In this way, we have gradually approached our goal of making 80% of our users happy when the first version of the feature goes live by giving them a significant improvement.

Inspect & Adapt: Different countries, different priorities

Our data acquisition platform publishing is used in many countries around the world. Many GS1 organizations have licensed publishing instances and offer this solution in their countries - see b

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