Menu design
Menus are an impossible to avoid area of information design. I don’t want to get into graphic design or typographic minutia, largely because I would have very little of interest to say. Instead, something I’ve not seen discussed elsewhere: the order items are listed in.
I’ve started to find alphabetically sorted menus boring. OK, they are optimised for findability, but surely eating/drinking out should offer a bit more mystique than deciding you want something, finding it alphabetically and then asking for it.
Signature dishes or drinks often get the top spots, but I can think of a few ways to sort the remaining offerings:
- price of ingredients / markup (helps profit)
- time to make (for cocktails - allows greater throughput)
- popularity (most user-friendly?)
- reverse chronological (to give new items a fair shot)
- random
Has anyone experimented with A-B testing on their menus? Steven Levitt thought he’d caught an example but it was just an old menu lurking.