Designing Restaurant Digital Menus to Enhance User Experience

Abstract

<p>Menu is a primary marketing and communication tools in the restaurants industry. Business-to-consumer digital devices are widely used in both daily life and business, especially the hospitality industry. Menus have a history of 260 years and now more restaurants are revising menus and starting to use digital menus. Marketing research and reports from Nation's Restaurant and New York Times show that digital menu helps restaurants to increase profit by making food more accessible, selling more and requiring less labor in comparison to the traditional printed paper menu. The design principles and user interface are different in print menu and digital menus and we need design guidelines for new generation of digital menus. Digital menus also offer great opportunities of customization and personalization for using interaction to enhance user experience.There is little research that has been done in the graphic design and human computer interaction field for digital menu design. It seems that digital menus create a more effective and flexible way of reading and ordering while at the same time people have different experiences and expectations for using digital menus with interaction, not to mention personalization and customization will create better user experience. Currently no specific research shows how typography, orientation, layout and columns work for digital menus; what the efficient ways of arranging all the elements in digital menus are, and how images, graphic elements and descriptions would help to communicate with viewers.</p>