Designing for Choice: Using NLP and Generative AI to Understand Consumer Health Choices
Consumer purchasing decisions are often influenced by packaging cues that may not accurately reflect a product's nutritional value. This phenomenon, known as the "Health Halo", can lead to confusion and suboptimal choices. This project applies the initial phases of the Design Thinking methodology—Discover and Define—to systematically analyze how food packaging shapes consumer perception of health. The findings will provide the foundation for future behavioral experiments.
As a student participant, your role is to conduct this foundational research. The objective is to use specific computational tools to understand how consumers interpret and react to packaging elements in the real world. You will be responsible for two primary tasks, guided by custom-built Google Colab tutorials.
First, you will apply Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, such as sentiment analysis and topic modeling, to perform a textual analysis on a large dataset of online product reviews. The goal is to quantitatively extract and categorize consumer comments related specifically to packaging—including marketing claims, color schemes, and nutritional labels—to identify common patterns of trust, confusion, and skepticism.
Second, you will use these data-driven insights to construct detailed user personas. Through structured prompt engineering, you will instruct Generative AI to create profiles and portraits that represent different consumer archetypes, such as the "claim-focused shopper" or the "label-savvy skeptic”.
Textual Analysis of Packaging Reviews. Apply NLP and topic modelling , guided by a Colab tutorial, to analyze consumer reviews. The objective is to identify and categorize comments related to product packaging, marketing claims, and label confusion.
Development. Use the insights from the textual analysis to construct data-driven user personas. This involves using prompt engineering and Generative AI to create detailed narrative profiles and visual portraits that represent key consumer archetypes
Final Report and Presentation. Consolidate findings from the analysis and the persona portfolio into a final summary report and present the key outcomes and methodology to the research team.
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francisco_benita@tec.mx
Design Thinking
Data-Driven Design
Sentiment Analysis
Generative AI
Food Packaging
