Guide9 min read

Setting up a digital menu: from printed card to screen in six steps

The decision is made, the display is mounted — and then the question arrives of what should actually appear on it. This guide describes the route we take with every hospitality client: six steps from survey to daily operation, including the mistakes we keep running into.

Digital menu boards above the counter in a restaurant

Most businesses underestimate one point: a digital menu is not a photographed paper card. Paper is read from thirty centimetres, seated, with time to spare. A screen is read from three metres, standing, while a queue grows behind you. Those are two different media, and transferring one to the other unchanged does not work.

Anyone who takes that difference seriously has already done the larger part of the work. The rest is craft.

Step 1: Survey the room

Before a single line of layout exists, we measure. Three values determine everything that follows:

Viewing distance. Where does the guest stand while reading? At the counter that is usually two and a half to four metres. The minimum type size follows from it — as a guide, capital height should be at least one five-hundredth of the distance. At three metres that is a good six millimetres on the display, so 28 to 36 pixels depending on the diagonal.
Reading time. How long does someone actually stand there? In a quick-service restaurant it is twenty to forty seconds, in a café with table service considerably longer. Short reading time means fewer items, larger type and no animation inside the text area.
Light conditions. Does daylight fall in from the side, does the window front reflect in the panel? That decides the brightness and whether light or dark layouts work better.

These three values also settle the number and format of the display surfaces. As a rule of thumb: up to about twelve items one 55-inch display in landscape is enough. Beyond that it gets busy faster than most people expect — then two or three display surfaces side by side are the calmer solution.

Step 2: Cut the menu down

This is the most uncomfortable step, and the one with the greatest effect. A paper menu can carry forty items because the guest can turn pages and jump back. A screen cannot — whatever was at the top is gone the moment it scrolls or switches.

We suggest sorting into three categories:

Carries the revenue. The items that actually sell. In most businesses these are surprisingly few — often eight to twelve dishes account for eighty per cent of turnover. These belong on the main display surface.
Adds sensibly. Sides, drinks, desserts. These can go on a second display surface or into a time-shifted loop.
Sits there out of habit. Items barely anyone orders. They belong on the printed card at the table, not on the display.

The most common mistake here is wanting to show everything. A display surface with twelve legible items sells more than one with forty that nobody deciphers.

From practice

For a Berlin chain we reduced the counter menu from 34 to 14 items. The operator was sceptical, expecting to lose the revenue of the dropped dishes. What actually happened was that sales shifted to the remaining items — at a higher average order value, because the high-margin dishes were now visible instead of disappearing into a list.

Step 3: Structure instead of prose

On paper, descriptions work: "House-made pasta with sun-ripened tomatoes, basil from our own garden and shaved Parmesan." On a screen at three metres, nobody reads that.

What works instead is a clear hierarchy in three levels:

Name of the dish — large, bold, immediately graspable
One to three keywords — the key ingredients or labels, set smaller
Price — in its own column, right-aligned, same size as the name

Prices belong in a column, not directly after the name. The reason is reading speed: someone looking for the price finds it in a column with one glance downwards. Behind dish names of varying length they have to search for it every time.

On colour: dark layouts with light text look more considered in a dining room and do not glare in the evening. Light layouts need more display brightness and quickly read as an advertising board. The exception is businesses with a very bright, white interior — there a light menu can be the better fit.

Step 4: Set up scheduling

This is where the real gain over paper sits, and it is the part most often left unused. A digital menu can follow the time of day — and it does not have to be done by hand.

A typical setup in hospitality:

Until 10:30 — breakfast, coffee specialities, takeaway offers
10:30 to 14:30 — lunch menu, dish of the day, lunch deal
14:30 to 17:00 — cake, coffee, reduced menu
From 17:00 — evening menu, drinks, promotions

This is set up once and then runs without intervention. One detail matters and is often forgotten: the change should not happen abruptly on the hour while someone is mid-read. A transition of two to three seconds with a soft fade reads calmer and does not irritate.

Minute-level scheduling requires SCRN Premium in our case; SCRN Basic switches by day. Anyone who only distinguishes weekday from weekend manages with Basic — anyone structuring the whole day needs Premium.

Step 5: Decide who maintains what

The point at which digital menus fail is rarely the technology. It is ownership. If nobody is named, the menu stays as it was on setup day — and six months later the prices are wrong.

What has proven itself:

One person per site with access and explicit responsibility. Not "the team", but a name.
A deputy who also has access and has practised once.
A fixed slot — Monday before opening, for instance — to review prices and availability.

Our handover takes around twenty minutes. Anyone who can drag a file into a folder can change the menu. What decides the outcome is not the training but whether somebody feels responsible.

Step 6: Refine after two weeks

No layout is right on the first attempt. After two weeks in operation you see things nobody could have predicted: that the third line from the bottom is never read because a fridge blocks the view. That the dish of the day is set too small. That the afternoon menu runs too long.

We plan this appointment in deliberately. Three questions are enough:

Which item is ordered more often than before, which less?
Do guests ask for something that is on the menu but evidently not being found?
Is there a time of day when the wrong menu is running?

The answers almost always lead to small corrections — a type size, an order, a switching time. After that the menu usually holds for months.

The four most common mistakes

Too many items. The classic. The paper menu is transferred one to one and is illegible from three metres.

Too much movement. Animated transitions between individual dishes look good on a monitor and restless in a room. Movement belongs at the edge, not in the text.

Images without quality. A badly lit phone photo looks considerably worse at 55 inches than no image at all. When in doubt, work typographically.

Nobody is responsible. Six months later the prices are wrong — the most common reason digital menus lose their effect.

What this means in time

From the first message to a running menu we plan one to two weeks for a standard setup. The bulk of that is not on our side but in step 2 — cutting the menu down. Businesses that come to the conversation prepared, knowing which dishes carry the revenue, are finished considerably faster.

If you like, send us your current menu and a photo of the counter. Then we will tell you which format fits, how many items make sense on it and what it costs.