In 2000, psychologists Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper published a now-famous study involving jam at a California farmers market. When they offered shoppers 24 varieties, foot traffic was high but sales were low. When they reduced the display to six varieties, sales jumped by 600%. The product was the same. The environment was the same. The only variable was the number of choices, and fewer choices produced dramatically more purchasing behavior.
Digital menus face an identical dynamic. Restaurants naturally want to show everything: every appetizer, every variation, every seasonal special, every drink. The instinct is understandable — more items mean more potential revenue, right? In reality, the opposite is true. When a guest opens a QR menu and is confronted with 80 items spread across a visually dense screen with competing colors, inconsistent formatting, walls of text, and no clear hierarchy, their brain triggers what cognitive scientists call decision paralysis. They stop evaluating and start looking for an exit. In a physical restaurant they cannot leave easily, so they default: they order whatever they already know, whatever is cheapest, or whatever their companion orders. The upwelling of carefully designed high-margin items you built your menu around never even gets a fair look.
Minimalist menu design is the discipline of removing everything that does not actively drive a guest toward a confident, satisfying order decision. It is not about having fewer items — it is about removing visual noise so that each item gets the full attention it deserves. The results are measurable: restaurants that implement genuine minimalist design principles on their digital menus report average order value increases of 12% to 22%, faster table turns, and consistently higher guest satisfaction scores.
White space — sometimes called negative space — is the area of a design that contains no content. For designers trained in print, white space is a luxury. For digital menu designers, it is structural load-bearing material. Every pixel of intentional empty space around a menu item makes that item easier to read, easier to tap, and easier to remember.
The typical smartphone screen is between 375 and 430 pixels wide. A restaurant menu item needs to communicate a name, a price, possibly a short description, and potentially a photo or allergen icon — all within that narrow column. When designers or restaurant owners try to pack too much into each row, the result is a screen that requires guests to pinch-zoom, squint, or re-read. Each friction point reduces the probability of that item being ordered.
Industry usability benchmarks for mobile commerce recommend a minimum touch target size of 44 by 44 pixels for any interactive element. Most well-designed digital menus go further, giving each item row a minimum height of 72 pixels with at least 16 pixels of vertical padding above and below the text block. This gives the thumb room to tap confidently without accidentally selecting the wrong item — a mistake that frustrates guests and undermines trust in the entire interface.
Horizontal spacing matters as much as vertical spacing. Text that runs edge-to-edge on a mobile screen is physically harder to read. The eyes must track longer lines, and the brain works harder to find the beginning of each new line. A horizontal margin of 16 to 24 pixels on each side keeps line lengths comfortable and the interface feeling open rather than cramped.
Between sections — between "Starters" and "Mains," for instance — a spacer of 32 to 48 pixels creates a clear visual break that helps guests navigate without relying solely on section headers. This kind of rhythmic breathing room turns a scroll through the menu into a structured journey rather than a wall-to-wall information assault.
A practical test: load your menu on a mid-range Android phone with a 5.5-inch screen and hold it at arm's length. If you cannot immediately identify the name and price of every item on screen without zooming, your spacing needs work. The arm's-length readability test is a simple heuristic that catches most density problems before they reach the guest.
Consistent visual rhythm — the regular interval at which similar elements appear as you scroll — creates an unconscious sense of professionalism and reliability. When item rows are consistently sized, consistently padded, and consistently formatted, the eye learns the pattern within the first two or three items and can then skim efficiently. When row heights vary randomly, descriptions appear or disappear unpredictably, and prices are sometimes left-aligned and sometimes right-aligned, the eye has to re-orient at every item. This is cognitively exhausting, and exhausted guests spend less.
Typography in a digital menu is not decoration. It is navigation. A well-executed typographic hierarchy creates a system of visual importance that guides the guest's eye in the exact sequence you want: category, item name, price, description — in that order, at those relative weights, every time.
Effective digital menu typography uses three distinct levels. The first level is the category or section header: "Starters," "Wood-Fired Mains," "Desserts." These should be the largest and heaviest elements on the screen, typically 20 to 24px in a medium or semibold weight. They anchor the guest's position in the menu and should be immediately visible when scrolling past a section boundary.
The second level is the item name. This should be clearly larger than the description text but smaller than the category header — typically 16 to 18px in a regular or medium weight. The item name is what the guest commits to memory. It should be readable at a single glance with no effort.
The third level is the item description. This is supporting information: ingredients, preparation method, origin of key components. It should be noticeably smaller and lighter than the item name — typically 13 to 14px in a light or regular weight, often in a slightly softer color than the item name to create natural visual subordination. Descriptions should be brief: two lines maximum on mobile. If a description requires more than two lines to convey the essential information, it needs editing, not expanding.
Brand personality is important, but not at the expense of legibility. Script fonts and decorative typefaces that look beautiful in a print menu header become illegible at body copy sizes on a backlit mobile screen. For digital menus, a clean sans-serif — Inter, Nunito, DM Sans, Figtree — provides the best combination of readability across screen sizes and optical sizes.
If your brand identity demands a distinctive typeface, use it exclusively for the restaurant name, the category headers, and perhaps a single featured item display. Revert to a clean sans-serif for all item names, descriptions, and prices. This maintains brand character without sacrificing the functional legibility that drives ordering confidence.
Text contrast is non-negotiable. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines specify a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for normal text and 3:1 for large text (18px and above). These are legal requirements in many jurisdictions and ethical requirements everywhere else. But beyond compliance, proper contrast simply makes text easier to read, especially in the variable lighting conditions of a restaurant — bright sunlight through a window, candlelight at dinner, fluorescent overhead lighting at a café counter. Pale gray body text on a white background may look refined in a design mockup but becomes invisible in daylight.
A practical tool: run your menu's color combinations through any web-based contrast checker before finalizing your design. Aim for ratios comfortably above the minimums — 6:1 or higher for body text ensures legibility in all real-world conditions.
Clutter in a digital menu comes in three forms: content clutter (too many items or too much text per item), visual clutter (competing decorative elements, inconsistent styling), and structural clutter (no clear hierarchy, no logical grouping). All three reduce conversion. All three require active, deliberate decisions to remove.
Menu engineering research consistently demonstrates that menus with 6 to 8 items per category outperform menus with 12 or more items per category, both in order value and in guest satisfaction. This is not because guests prefer fewer options in the abstract — it is because 6 to 8 items is a manageable number that the working memory can hold and compare simultaneously, while 12 or more overwhelms the comparison process and forces guests to make hasty, random selections.
The audit process: list every item in each category. Identify the three highest-margin items and the three most-ordered items. If they overlap, your core items are clear. If they do not overlap, you have a menu engineering problem separate from the design question. Remove any item that is not among the top performers by margin or volume, is not essential for a dietary segment you need to serve, and is not creating meaningful differentiation for your brand. Be ruthless. Every item that stays on the menu dilutes the attention given to the items you actually want to sell.
Visual clutter accumulates gradually in digital menus, usually because each addition seems justified in isolation. A banner announcing the new brunch menu. A badge marking the chef's favorite item. A flame icon for spicy dishes. A star icon for popular dishes. A leaf for vegetarian. A wheat stalk for gluten-free. A seedling for vegan. Before long, every item is festooned with four icons, two badges, and a promotional tag, and none of them mean anything because they are all competing for the same attention.
The discipline of deliberate exclusion means deciding which signals are load-bearing — genuinely helping guests make better decisions — and which are decorative noise. Allergen and dietary icons (vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, nut allergy) are load-bearing: they enable guests with specific needs to navigate safely and quickly. "Chef's pick" or "popular" badges may have value on one or two items per category, but they lose all meaning when applied to a third of the menu. Promotional banners that appear on every page teach guests to ignore them within seconds.
A clean rule: no more than two non-price data points per item (the item name is not a data point — it is the item). If you need to communicate more than two things about an item beyond its name, description, and price, the description is not doing its job.
Long descriptions are a form of clutter. They force guests to read, which takes time and cognitive effort, and if the description is not exceptionally well-written, the effort is wasted. The best digital menu descriptions follow a simple formula: key ingredients, primary preparation technique, and one sensory detail. "Slow-braised lamb shoulder, root vegetable puree, rosemary jus." That is 8 words. It tells the guest everything they need to decide whether they want it. Compare to: "Our tender, fall-off-the-bone slow-braised lamb shoulder, lovingly prepared over 8 hours with our special blend of herbs and spices, served alongside our chef's signature root vegetable puree and a rich, aromatic rosemary and red wine reduction." At 44 words, it communicates no more information and takes five times as long to read. On a mobile screen, it wraps to five or six lines and pushes the price and the next item below the fold.
Icons in a digital menu serve one legitimate purpose: communicating categorical information faster than text. A small leaf icon communicates "vegetarian" in a fraction of a second. A wheat stalk communicates "contains gluten." These are genuine UX wins — they enable guests with dietary restrictions to scan a menu in seconds rather than reading every description. Used beyond this scope, icons become decoration that the eye learns to skip.
A well-designed digital menu icon set has five to seven icons maximum: vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, contains nuts, spicy (with a single level — either it is marked spicy or it is not), popular (used sparingly, maximum two per category), and new (for recently added items, with a commitment to removing this label after four to six weeks). Every icon beyond this set requires justification, and the justification must be stronger than "it would be nice to communicate this."
Icon design should be consistent in style, size, and visual weight. Mixing outline icons with filled icons, or icons of varying complexity and stroke weight, creates an inconsistent visual language that feels amateur and undermines brand confidence. Choose one icon set and use it exclusively. If using a system like Solar Icons or a similar structured set, stick to one visual style variant — either all outline or all bold — throughout the entire menu.
Icons should appear in a consistent position relative to the item name — either immediately to the right of the name on the same line, or as a small cluster below the name and above the description. Size should be 16 to 20 pixels: large enough to be recognizable at a glance, small enough to not compete with the item name for visual dominance. Icons should never appear larger than the item name text, and they should never be placed between the item name and the price, where they interrupt the natural left-to-right or name-to-price scanning path.
Single-color icons in the body text color are almost always preferable to color-coded icons. Color-coding requires the guest to learn your color system before they can interpret the icons — a cognitive overhead that eliminates the time-saving benefit the icons were supposed to provide. The exception is a single high-contrast accent color for one specific icon type, such as a red chili for spicy items or a green leaf for vegetarian. These are so culturally established that guests interpret them correctly without any mental translation.
Food photography is the single most powerful conversion driver in a digital menu — and the single easiest way to destroy your menu's usability if applied without strategy. The same research that supports minimalist design also quantifies the value of food images: items with high-quality photos sell at rates 30% to 65% higher than identical items without photos. The keyword is high-quality. Low-quality, poorly lit, or unappetizing photos actively reduce order rates for the items they represent.
Do not photograph every item. Photograph approximately 30% of your menu, focusing on your highest-margin items, your signature dishes, and any items that are difficult to visualize from a text description alone. When every item has a photo, photos lose their attention-focusing power. They become wallpaper — background texture the eye scrolls past rather than stops on. When 30% of items have photos, those items immediately command disproportionate visual attention, which translates directly into disproportionate order rates. This is the visual equivalent of featuring a headline item in a print ad: scarcity of images creates hierarchy of attention.
Images in a mobile digital menu work best in one of two layout configurations. The first is a thumbnail to the right of the item text: a square or slightly portrait-oriented image, approximately 80 to 100 pixels wide, with the item name, description, and price to the left. This configuration keeps the text primary and the image as a visual confirmation — the guest reads the name and then glances at the image to confirm their mental picture. The second configuration is a full-width hero image above the item name, used for one or two featured items per category at most. This configuration commands significant vertical screen space and should be reserved only for the items you most want to sell.
Avoid the common mistake of using landscape-oriented images cropped to a narrow horizontal strip. This aspect ratio rarely shows the dish attractively — it usually crops the most visually appealing part of the plate and creates a thin band of texture rather than an evocative food photograph. A square or 4:3 aspect ratio with the dish centered in the frame works reliably across all item types.
The investment in professional food photography pays back within weeks in increased order value, but there are minimum standards below which photography does more harm than good. Natural or controlled studio light, no harsh shadows, clean props, and proper food styling are non-negotiable. A smartphone photo taken under fluorescent restaurant lighting with sauce smears on the plate edge and a hand in the background is worse than no photo at all. It signals a lack of care for presentation that guests transfer to their expectations of the food itself.
If professional photography is not immediately available for the full menu, start with your three or four signature items, invest in proper photography for those, and leave all other items photo-free until you can produce images that meet the same standard. A partial menu of excellent images outperforms a complete menu of mediocre images every time.
Image performance is a design decision. A menu that loads slowly because of unoptimized images creates frustration that contradicts every other improvement you make to the experience. Images in a digital menu should be served in modern formats (WebP or AVIF), sized appropriately for mobile screens (never wider than the display width at maximum resolution), and loaded progressively — showing a low-quality placeholder that resolves to the full image as it loads. This technical discipline is inseparable from the visual discipline of minimalist design: both are in service of a guest experience that feels effortless.
Implementing minimalist design principles does not require a complete redesign. In most cases, a focused audit reveals four to six specific changes that produce 80% of the improvement. Work through this checklist on your current menu and address each item in order of impact:
Minimalist design is not a style preference — it is a revenue strategy. Every element you remove that was not earning its space creates room for the elements that are. Clean spacing gives items room to breathe and be considered. Disciplined typography guides the eye to the decision. Restrained icon use makes the icons that remain meaningful. Strategic photography makes the right items irresistible. Taken together, these principles create a menu that feels effortless to use — and guests who feel effortless order with confidence.
Color is the fastest signal your menu sends to a guest's brain. Understand warm tones, highlight strategy, CTA colors, and accessibility to design menus that convert.
The order, position, and visual weight of items on your digital menu directly influences what guests choose to order. Learn how to use hero sections, visual anchors, badges, premium framing, and structured testing to put your best-selling and highest-margin dishes front and centre.
The fonts you choose for your digital menu communicate quality before a guest reads a single word — learn the pairing rules, readability standards, and multilingual considerations that separate polished menus from amateur ones.
Starten Sie noch heute Ihre kostenlose 14-tägige Testversion – keine Kreditkarte erforderlich
Werfen Sie einen Blick auf unser Cookies Policy für mehr Information.
Essential
Session, security & basic functionality. Always active.
Analytics
Google Analytics & usage statistics to improve our service.
Preferences
Theme, language & personalization settings.
Third-party
Stripe payments, embedded content & external services.
