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Comment by ArmandGrillet | Hacker News Reader

Except for calories, I would not be able to understand what means the information on nutrient icons without having the corresponding word next to it.

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From TFA:

> “We realize that some of the visuals may not already be strongly linked in consumer minds to the nutrient they are meant to depict in all markets.”

> “We intend to promote understanding of the images through supporting materials in Europe, from web sites to images explained on tray liners and via in-store displays,” ...

> “After repeated exposure to these images, customers should eventually grasp their meaning, with or without printed labels next to them.”

After repeated exposure to these words, customers should eventually grasp their meaning, with or without printed translations next to them.

Yeah -- think about a lot of commonly accepted icons, like for nuclear radiation or biohazards. Or even the weird icons like those for "pause" and "record" on media devices -- these aren't intuitive icons, we've just gotten used to them.

I remember when those (>> for fast fwd, etc) were introduced by Japanese cassette tape companies in the early 70s. They were somewhat controversial!

None of the icons McDonald's chose as their final ones had any meaning to me without a translation chart. How is that different from learning what a word means?

Didn't anyone at McDonald's dare to question the basic idea of this?

Are you saying it would be better to just teach their customers the English words for these things? Esperanto? I mean, I might probably agree with that, but I don't know that the customers would.

> Are you saying it would be better to just teach their customers the English words for these things?

Yes. It's the same amount of teaching and learning. Actually, it's probably less of both, because:

1. A fair fraction (most?) of the customers would already know some english, whereas zero know what those icons mean.

2. Knowledge of english words is valuable to anyone and is transferable to other domains. Knowledge of McDonald's icons is useless outside of McDonald's.

3. Deciphering english is a trivial peck at an online dictionary. Whatcha gonna do about an icon?

English words are creeping in everywhere anyway.

They explains it in the paper. There are cultural and legal limitations. So your knowledge of English will not help when you travel to a country that requires packaging in native language. On the other hand, learning 'universal' icons will help you everywhere.

An english word is not harder to learn than an icon. It is not harder to attach a cultural and legal explanation of the usage of a word than an icon.

I do enjoy the irony of evading laws that require packaging in the native language, so McDonald's invents a new non-native language instead.

> McDonald’s faced this daunting challenge with its recent Nutrition Information Initiative (NII). The company wanted to make nutrition information more accessible and understandable to the average consumer, and determined through extensive research that visual icons representing key food nutrients (protein, for example) were the appropriate course of action.

It sounds like McDonald's had decided the icons were the way to go before bringing in this translation company.

That was what they were aiming for. They wanted symbols that were either obvious in meaning, or 'blank slates' onto which they could imbue meaning. What they were trying to avoid was symbols who preexisting associations would contradict or cause confusion with the meaning they wanted to provide.

Better to give meaning to nonsense than to try and fight against peoples' culture.

The media playback icons were supposedly inspired by Wassily Kandinsky.

Hmm, both Biohazard and Radiation symbols were chosen because they look (at least somewhat) ugly and dangerous even to the unfamiliar.

What I found most interesting was not the rather meaningless icon choices, but the incredibly deceptive dotted line seen on page 12. It's basically anchoring people in a meaningless way such that not everything seems bad.

Without the line it's like 50% more sodium relative to the number of calories I am eating. That's terrible. With the line ehh, I guess everything looks ok.

Page 12 not page 2

Is the dotted line deceptive? It just seems like a ⅓DV line (for the large number of people who eat three meals in a day), which clearly shows you that this meal is high in sodium, so should be accompanied with other meals which are lower in sodium.

You are falling for the framing. If something is 28% of your DV worth of calories it's not a meal. The line makes it seem that as long as each 'bad' item is under the line it's ok.

Sure the fries are over it, but the burger only 1/2 way their so that's probably ok.

The line simply shows one third of your recommended daily allowance (based of the somewhat popular notion of "three square meals a day" I imagine). If anything it's useful.

A single serving that breaches the line should be treated with caution, making it straightforward to understand which foods are contributing disproportionately to your daily allowance.

Consider your looking at fries and it's 30% of your daily sodium intake which is below the line. But, it's only 10% of your daily calorie intake because it's a side for one meal. In that context it's sodium relative to calories that's important or sodium in combination with the rest of your meal. In none of those cases is a line at 33.3% useful for anything.

So why not just snap to simplified Chinese? You'd get a billion person headstart and the ideograms are probably just as arbitrary.

I did have that thought! But most likely these are all several characters in Chinese.

protein: 蛋白 fat: 脂肪 salt: 盐 carbohydrate: 糖类 calorie: 千卡

I dunno...

I just checked a bag of noodles I had lying around, and it uses

protein: 蛋白质, fat: 脂肪, sodium: 钠, carbohydrates: 碳水化合物, energy content: 能量 (measured in kJ: 千焦)

So there is the additional problem of a. measuring different things (or using different units) and b. using different words to mean the same things.

I think the important question is whether a Chinese reader would understand the character脂 (also 'fat') on its own without the whole phrase, the way we would understand 'carb' or 'cal'.

That's a great thought.. can anyone chime in?

This is beyond stupid. Why use all the effort to explain the icons, when simply using a boring text suffices.

It almost seems like they purposely don't want consumers to understand the information.

Ditto. I suspect they could have gotten better international recognition by just using the English words.

It would have pissed off the French of course, but that goes in the win column. ;-)

The point was not to get optimal international recognition. Almost the opposite: every symbol should be inoffensive and connote no negative or inappropriate ideas in 108 countries.

And they accomplished that, by designing symbols that convey no meaning whatsoever.

Y'all down-voting this but it's true.

Of course McDonalds is in an excellent position to slowly give these symbols meaning through constant exposure, but inherently the way they're designed does not convey anything at all. They might as well have just used colours or shapes.

Exactly but what shapes? How about a cross, a six pointed star and a crescent? They are simple and distinctive...

I'm thinking the swastika is due for reinterpretation. Let's make it mean "fat".

Symbols, in origin, fundamentally have no meaning.

How true is that? A started as a cow (flip it upside down). That meaning is lost, true, but the Sackcasse (no exit) street sign, or a "T" junction street sign both abstract a physical system.

The Korean alphabet shapes relate to the shape your mouth adopts to make the sound. Many Hanzi have structural association (even ignoring the radicals, which you could consider for the purpose of this discussion analogous to spelling)

And the meaning of the chemical symbols (e.g. "Fe" as the symbol for iron) made a lot of them easier for me to learn, though if you don't grow up with the right set of languages they are somewhat arbitrary.

And, of course, they provide employment for semioticists.

And doesn't most of the world use kJ, not kCal?

Typically (or perhaps always) in EU countries, both kJ and kcal are specified on nutrition labels. And in my experience most people only ever talk about calories (kcal), much like in the US.

To add to the other comment, kJ is almost entirely unused on labels in many countries I have visited (e.g. India). kcal is likely more universal.

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