The Psychology of Menu Design

How it Influences our Order

When you’re browsing through the menu at your favourite restaurant, take a moment to consider how it’s designed to influence your choices. Pay attention to the layout, colours, and descriptions of each dish. This is all part of the psychology behind restaurant menu design.

Menus are strategically crafted to guide your decisions, often aiming to encourage you to spend more money on the various dishes on display in the menu. Menu designing is done through scientific research and extensive study, using elements like placement, colour psychology, enticing language, cost control and more.

Few of the ways that restaurants trick customers into buying certain dishes are decoy dishes, colour confusion, limited choices, storytelling, controlled costing, etc.

Decoy Dishes

Here restaurants try to deceive their customers by placing more expensive items at the top of the menu. This makes the other dishes more look appealing and tricks the diners into an impression that they’re getting a bargain encouraging them to spend more.

Colour Confusion

The colours on the menu majorly impact our decisions on what to order. Yellow gives out a happy hue whereas green implies that the food is fresh. The colour that has the best effect is red, which encourages action and is used to persuade customers into buying meals with the restaurant’s highest profit margins

Limited Choices

Ever heard of menu anxiety? Its where diners feel stressed due to the variety of dishes to choose from. A huge menu might feel right and sound like a great idea but in the end it all leads to menu anxiety. Clever restaurant owners make a list of only seven dishes in every section that makes us feel like we have enough options to choose from without making us feel overwhelmed.

Story Telling

Most of the dishes in the menu will have the same description lengths to fit in the basic layout of the page. But when they want a particular dish to stand out, dishes that they want to sell more of that have the highest profit margins, it is made sure that the description of this particular dish doesn’t fit the pattern of the rest of the dishes which makes it stand out more to catch the diners’ attention.

Controlled Costing

The price of the dish is one of the main things that a consumer considers before ordering a dish. It doesn’t matter how irresistible the dish sounds, the price of it always comes first. Usually, dishes are priced at numbers like ₹299, ₹499, etc, that makes customers feel like they’re getting a great deal out of it. That is exactly why eateries tend to use round number.

These are just few of the ways that restaurants trick their diners into choosing dishes that they want to sell more of. So next time you visit an eatery, keep these points in mind before you order.

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