Ask HN: Is every restaurant going to have a digital menu? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is every restaurant going to have a digital menu?

What's your best guess?

Are digital (so called "QR menus") a temporary thing, and one year down the road we all will be using paper menus?

Or is it just the first step, and every restaurant will have a slick online menu 3-5 years from now?

Anything in between?

I have no idea the answer to your question, but personally, I find digital QR menus to be very poor UX. I know they've been around for a long time, but in my area I've only started seeing them more commonly the past few months; it seems the pandemic has driven a lot of restaurants to get rid of paper menus (hopefully temporarily).

We have a young kid and most of the time one of us (my spouse or myself) have to be paying attention to her, especially while outside. Looking at a restaurant menu on a mobile phone makes it pretty much impossible to look at and share and discuss items on the menu, while the other person can only pay 20% of attention (because the other 80% attention is on the kid). The end result is usually one person can't really order what they want. Paper menus are larger, have pictures, easier to flip around pages or sides, easier to point to things between two people (when one is not paying full attention) and generally more visible (when one is not paying full attention).

It's bad enough that we either avoid places with digital menu or have to make plans in advance to be sure we look through the menu at home the day before going.

I hate the half assed ones that are just a QR code link to a menu jpg/pdf, but quite a few of the asian restaurants here link directly to an online order form for dine in that lets everyone at the table order what they want from their own phone, pictures for every item - you don't pay from the phone, you just order from the phone and enter any special instructions etc. The page when scanned already comes up with "Table: 30B-1" or something similar.

I like the latter. I hate the former. Most US restaurants do the former.

Yeah it’s really not ideal for small children, on multiple levels. There is often no physical kids menu and no accompanying crayons :(

I share a lot of the sentiment here, I find QR menus to be super annoying and to have poor UX.

But I also don't think that the development will go further than this, given that most restaurant owners aren't exactly tech savvy people and in my experience, many don't seem or understand the benefits a more digital experience could bring them.

I hope they don't become standard and they go away soon. The two main reasons are that not everybody has a smartphone or the ability to scan the QR code and security.

My mom still has a flip phone and does not want to get a smartphone at all. Not everybody has the desire to have a flip phone. They would not be able to look at the menu in any meaningful way.

Many of the restaurants I've seen with QR codes for menus have the QR as a sticker on the table. It isn't hard for somebody to create a QR that leads to a malicious site and just place those on top of the existing QR codes.

I hate those digital QR code menus in person. First of all, it is lazy and honestly a lot more work for me to try and read on my phone.

Genuinely, I find the QR Code menus super annoying.

There's something nice about the tangibility of a physical menu. But if a company can create a super sleek product for a digital menu, and perhaps integrates direct payments into it (so that people don't have to Venmo each other etc), then that could be an awesome opportunity.

If a restaurant is going to online menu thing, they need to offer free WiFi. There are a few places I've gone to that have online menus and there is no data service or WiFi.

The concept has been around for a while, especially with Asian places. They had tablets years ago when I was in high school or 2014.

I can see them being a lot more common in chain restaurants, but plenty of restaurant owners still aren't that proficient with tech.

QR menus don't work well for children and old people. They don't work for people with no phone, no battery or no mobile data.

Some restaurants will realise this and switch to paper menus, or alienate part of their clientele.

I'm yet another person who dislikes QR code menus. Most of the time it doesn't work and when you're travelling with iffy data or battery then it's even worse.

Best new restaurant tech I've seen so far is Grabbi. 10sec tab order and pay thanks to Apple App clips.

https://grabbishop.com/

Is this something American? Never seen this in Poland.

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