Digital Menus, Done Without Annoying Your Customers
6 min read · Updated
Digital menus arrived everywhere at once during the pandemic, and a lot of diners came out of that period actively disliking them. That reaction was earned, but it was aimed at the wrong thing. The problem was almost never that the menu was on a phone. It was what restaurants put there.
A PDF is not a digital menu
What most places did was photograph or export the paper menu and put the file online. The result is a page-shaped document on a screen that is not page-shaped, so the customer pinches, zooms, drags sideways, loses their place, and gives up somewhere around the starters.
That experience is what people mean when they say they hate scanning a menu. It has nothing to do with the link, the code, or the card. It is a layout problem, and it is entirely solvable by using a web page that reflows to fit the phone instead of a document that does not.
The test is simple and you can run it in ten seconds. Open your own menu on your own phone. If you have to zoom, your customers are already annoyed.
What you get back once it is a real page
Price changes stop being a reprint. You edit the page and every card in the building is already pointing at the new version, because the card holds the address of the menu rather than the menu itself.
Running out of something stops being a conversation. An item can be marked unavailable the moment the kitchen says so, instead of a server apologising at every table for the rest of the evening.
And the things that never fit on paper become possible. Photographs of the dishes, which sell food better than any description. Allergen and dietary information that customers can check themselves rather than asking, which many people would rather do quietly. Seasonal specials that go up for a week and come down again at no cost.
Where the card goes
The menu card has an adhesive back, so it goes on the table, on the counter, on a window, or on the front of an existing menu stand. Remove the liner, press it down, and it stays. It can be lifted and moved later if you rearrange the room.
Table placement wants a little thought. The card should be where a seated diner's hand naturally rests, not centred behind the condiments where nobody notices it. If your tables get reset constantly, the edge nearest the customer survives service better than the middle.
For takeaway and counter service the spot is different. Put it where the queue actually stops, which is usually at the till rather than at the door.
Keep the paper menus
This is the part most digital menu pitches leave out, and it is the difference between a restaurant that gets this right and one that irritates a portion of its customers every night.
Some diners cannot use a phone menu, and some simply do not want to. Older customers, anyone with a vision impairment, a table whose phones are all dead at the end of a long day, a party who came out specifically to not look at screens. A stack of paper menus behind the counter costs almost nothing and removes the entire objection.
Offered as a choice, the digital menu stops being something imposed on people. Nearly everyone under forty will use it happily, and nobody is left stranded.
Point it at a page you own
Menus get pointed at all sorts of places: a delivery platform listing, a social media post, a shared file, a third party menu service. All of those work, right up until the day the platform changes its address, ends the free tier, or reorganises what a link goes to.
If the card points at a page on your own site, none of that can happen to you. You change the menu, the cards keep working, and the traffic lands somewhere you control and can measure rather than on a platform that also happens to be listing your competitors on the same screen.
That last part is worth more than it first appears. A customer looking at your menu on a delivery app is one tap from four other restaurants. A customer looking at your menu on your site is not.
Nobody minds a digital menu. They mind a PDF. Build it as a real page, leave paper available for the people who want it, and the complaints do not happen.