It varies through regions. It is completely the opposite in China because:
- No extra app. People scan the QR in WeChat (everybody has it) on the table, it will call a mini-app dynamically (somewhat similar to React Native but interpreted in WeChat).
- You are putting orders directly.
- You are paying within WeChat as well so it's seamless.
- The app is smooth because almost every restaurant is using the takeout giant Meituan's mini-app.
- Almost every single restaurants in China is tech savvy enough to use those systems because it's already a take-out centered society. Restaurants not leveraging these systems have virtually zero chance to survive the competition.
- You don't have to wait for anything or talk to anybody in the whole process.
The problems people mentioned in this thread:
- Minorities, people without smart phone or those are less tech savvy, are left behind.
- The walled garden and monopolies and such.
These problems are real, but it's probably not the QR menu to blame, because it's a far greater problem - in China, you are not allow to go anywhere without WeChat and scanning QR code due to those draconian regulations.
I lived in China and I thought it sucked there too. I always found it an epic cop-out by the restaurants and cafés who refused to answer questions about their dishes or allow a simple additional request like adding more spicy. Invariably the restaurants with QR code menus were also the ones that featured pretentiously-named menu items so you had very little idea what it was going to be until after you ordered it. Fortunately while I lived in China (up through the early months of COVID) the vast majority of small restaurants still kept their classic red-and-yellow menu board that literally just says in the name of the dish exactly what you are going to get. And it was no problem to ask a question to clarify an ingredient or ask for something special.
What I don't understand is if you're just going to order off an app, what's the point of even going to the restaurant in the first place? That no-human-contact experience already exists in delivery apps, so why bother leaving your home or office if when you go out you just end up with the exact same experience? It's not like most of these restaurants are snazzy KTVs or tea houses where you get a private room and bottle service, they're just bog-standard food court style restaurants with hard chairs and dirty floors. You could just as easily order online and eat the food on a park bench. To me the whole thing just came across as inconvenient at best and actively destructive of local communities and their social restaurant culture at worst.
We go to restaurant with friends, not for social interaction with waiters, I don't miss the human-contact experience at all. I don't know why it is part of experience of restaurant, I am interested in food, and chatting with friends. I don't care about the service, except the speed of the service. Additional bonus of the app is that it has pictures of everything you order, and also you can order at your own pace. The restaurant owner don't have time to entertain you, they are selling at a reasonable price which doesn't including entertaining you, and you don't tip them in China as well.
While I actually like the food, I've found myself on several occasions just deciding that I don't want to go eat at Nandos because they've managed to make entire process so entirely hostile to basic human interaction. Just let me order my food from a real person please. It's so much easier that opening a digital menu and then needing to input my card info. It just makes me feel like I'm eating at a fancy McDonald's.
That hasn’t been my experience. (Living in a tier ome city since mid 2019.) Maybe it’s different now that QR menus are more the norm, or maybe we just go to different restaurants. If anything it’s easier to talk to a server, because they’re not handling the mechanics of order collection and bill payment for everyone else. I don’t miss having to get the server’s attention to try to settle the bill.
So if you lose your phone, forget your phone, if you don't have any battery, or if you have any internet issue, you can't order.
You cannot have the whole menu in front of you, you have to scroll and change sections. If it's cold, you can't order without talking your gloves off, if it's sunny, you better have a very bright phone or the menu will be unreadable.
As everything in China, you cannot pay without being electronically tracked, and you can't give a tip without going through a system that will likely take a cut. I will refrain to reach the Godwin point here since I assume it's been debated ad nausaum.
And of course, if something is not on the menu, you can't order it.
As usually with systems that are 100% digital, it gives you zero margin of maneuver outside of the happy path.
I don't want every restaurant to turn into a Mac Donald. If I want Mac Donald's, I go there.
McDonalds (and most of their competitors) are actually pretty good/ok for customizations. Usually what's missing is some edge cases like "no ice" or fully exhaustive lists.
This is not entirely correct, many places still do accept cash and allow you to order without your phone. It just so happens that most people prefer to order and pay by phone.
I agree it's hard to run a profitable restaurant, but I disagree it works fine in Singapore. I just had lunch at a QR based restaurant here and it was a bit painful. Staff shortages are a real problem though in F&B so something has to give.
Thankfully printed menus are making a comeback. Even when the apps work fine I still prefer a printed menu.
I hate them. It's 100x easier to browse a paper menu than the scroll through 2-5 dishes per screen, and often have to navigate sub menus trying to find what's available.
I didn't come to a restaurant to fiddle with my phone for 5 to 10 minutes
> You don't have talk to anybody in the whole process.
It is a subjective matter anyway. I love menu with pictures, digital menu is very good, you can see what you are getting, even some descriptions if the menu is designed very well. Much better than the one page menu small restaurant offers. And you don't have to talk to anyone, meaning you don't have to rush because people are waiting, no need to hold your hand in air for very long, trying to catch the eyes of a waiter.
If there was no obsession with registrations, it wouldn't have been a problem at all.
For the menu no app is needed, the places I go always open a web page menu(provided by a service specialising in this particular niche).
The payment could be completed through things like Apple Pay, per table basis. So you scan a QR code, it instantly opens a session for you and you can start ordering things and once you are done you close the session by paying through some payment processor.
Also, the technology to open apps with temporary sessions without installing the app exist both on iOS and Android but for some reason it never got popular.
Same experience in Norway. Most day-to-day operations are handled using apps. Ordering at restaurants using QR codes, finding out bus routes and paying for a (digital) bus tickets, paying for a parking spot, using EV charging stations, etc. It is all done using an app. Apple Pay is a blessing. It takes a bit of getting used to. Especially as a tourist. But it works great. But I hate think what would happen if a loose my phone…
As for the first point, Apple has a solution called App Clips (https://developer.apple.com/app-clips/) however I have never seen it in the wild even here in the Bay Area. Some commenters last time it was mentioned said they’ve used it at gas stations? I’m not sure if Android has anything conceptually similar.
I think "Instant Apps"[1] are/were meant to be the Android analog, but I haven't seen them used anywhere.
Also can't find any proof that they are still a thing... except for this[2] sketchy looking app that has 1 billion+ downloads, offered by "Google Play Store"
Ah, thanks for that. I had no idea how the following worked, but it was quite heavenly. Was at a restaurant who dropped the bill on my table after dining. It had a standard receipt on a black tray like you'd see anywhere in the US. But the receipt had a QR code along with a note about Apple Pay. I thought, "Hey I'd rather do Apple Pay than give them a CC so I scanned it.
I was prompted with one of those App Clip interfaces, double-clicked to approve the Apple Pay, and done.
It was such a nice experience, no nagging prompts forcing me to download some crappy App. Just a simple clean, Apple Pay checkout.
Note I agree with TFA about QR menus. But this level of phone integration was the perfect amount on top of a traditional dining experience.
The only time I’ve ever used this was trying to buy something in person at an Apple Store. Scan a QR code, something like the store app pops up, payment doesn’t work, staff can’t figure out what’s wrong. Waste 10 minutes and finally realize I’d deleted the full app because I never use it.
They’re extraordinarily convenient; a cafe I enjoy uses it for the total bill. Instead of handing off your physical card, the QR code presents your bill within the app clip, complete with apple pay (or enter your card details), done.
I live in China and here's an anti-anecdote. I had a terrible QR code menu the other day where you'd sit down, order, but there was no pay button. This set of my alarm bells immediately. And indeed, for a dinner that was supposed to be around 200-300, we wound up paying nearly 100 in additional fees that were mystically added to our apparently open bill without declaration. I complained about this at the counter when leaving and they refused to engage. The food was bad too, it was clearly a scam. I left them a terrible review and immediately decided never to dine at a QR code menu only restaurant again, and have so far stuck to my guns. Incidentally, I also work in foodtech.
I built a web-app MVP which is basically a QR menu app, as a web-app with URLs for each menu in the format webappDomain/RestaurantName, for example my demo is at tearounder.app/TheLoremIpsum
My MVP solves quite a few of the grumbles people mention, and other grumbles either dictate the sort of venues that shouldn't adopt this tech, or show why this tech should always be as well as traditional service not "instead of". (There are also some grumbles that require more development to iron out)
Stuff my MVP does that solve grumbles mentioned in this thread:
- simple URL format means you can use the URL rather than scan a QR code. If the restaurant name is long, a shorter version of the name should be used for good UX. I see QR codes that point to those URLs, as a good and easy option to provide for those people who now expect a QR code, but not the main way to access the menu.
- web based means no need to install an app (I have also met some of the basic requirements for a "Progressive Web App" so some browsers will let you save it to your device once you are on the website if you want)
- I keep file-sizes low, and put thought and effort into making it load and continue functioning smoothly even over slow and patchy internet connections. There are some things I could do to improve performance and smoothness on poor connections, particularly during building up your order, but it was easy to make it so that you can browse a menu to your hearts content even if your connection drops completely right after page load. Right now data for entire menu comes over at page load as JSON (that was created when restaurant last changed their menu), all UI up to placing order is handled in one page via client side JS, then as you add items to your order ajax calls add those items to a WooCommerce cart and tapping order sends you to a WordPress/WooCommerce checkout screen. Extra dev time to make a buffered version of that system, would get the connection need down to just the pageload and checkout/pay, but with the basic setup I have right now there is also need for a connection each time you add an item. The MVP setup would also require restaurants to have their woocommerce orders page up on some device behind the bar, which is not a great UI for their needs - so a "full" version of the web-app would need a custom page, and only use WooCommerce as a back-end if that made sense for that restaurant.
The problem with QR menus is not that they are inefficient, often they're very efficient. It's that it's impersonal and demeaning, the waiters are reduced to food carriers.
I like it. It's annoying to wait for the waiter to come over with menus, it's annoying to wait to ask them to bring a menu back because you want to order more, and it's gross when you get a menu that hasn't been wiped down properly and is sticky with god knows what, and it's wasteful when they're printing hundreds of fresh menus a day for the places that give everyone a fresh one.
Keep a few backup printouts for those who need them (like your phone gets no signal), but otherwise it's a fantastic step forwards. Goodbye to grimy wasteful printouts.
Plus the bonus of never having to experience "oh sorry we're out of that" if they update the menus dynamically is fantastic.
The only annoying thing is that the menu it opens is a pdf that was designed to be printed on A0 apparently, with times new Roman 10 point font, food on extreme left and price on extreme right.
And then you keep scrolling back and forth on your iPhone trying to read them.
Bonus points if you put the pdf in an iFrame in a site that’s off the bootstrap template but they forgot to include the js file so it zooms the hamburger button instead of the pdf when you pinch and refreshes the page when you jerk it too much.
If so many of the menus weren’t PDFs, I think the overall idea wouldn’t get such a bad rap. But yeah around half of all restaurants still do it in my experience.
It’s remarkable how particular non-IT industries attract personalities that are more or less technically averse than others. Arts and media, retail, building contractors: generally quite competent. Lawyers, medical: usually pretty bad.
Restauranteurs: the most technically inept grandparent you’ve ever encountered, the one who insists that if they ever touch a mouse it will catch on fire, and then somehow proves it
I've literally never seen that. It's almost always some web app type thing where you can select what you want, order it, and pay using apple pay/Vipps (my country's main electronic money transfer thing)/card. The UX isn't always perfect, but it has always worked too.
Edit: Downvotes? For simply sharing my conflicting experience? Okay.
It's also annoying to have to bring a phone to a restaurant. Not everyone carries them everywhere. I resent having to have one with me to participate fully in modern society, always listening and collecting data for its corporate masters. I occasionally wish I could throw mine into a large body of water; who knows, maybe some day I will.
This is a bizarre take. I dine/eat out fairly often to a point I know the staff names in quite a few places (it's Europe, no tipping culture, either). I don't quite see how I could customize any order with a web interface, realistically (food intolerances).
>when they're printing hundreds of fresh menus a day
They change the menu every day? Around here the menus are commonly placed in a book alike folder or the least they will have a plastic slip. As for waste the online part (with datacenters and all) would be more wasteful/less green.
>Plus the bonus of never having to experience "oh sorry we're out of that" if they update the menus dynamically is fantastic.
So they need to link the kitchen to the menu system in real time. That feels unliklely - most of the menus would mostly static web (or worse pdf) interfaces, and an order button.
> That feels unliklely - most of the menus would mostly static web (or worse pdf) interfaces, and an order button.
You say that like it's a given, but why? Products that can dynamically update the menu when something is out of stock with a couple of touches from FOH staff already exist. It's not exactly complex.
> I don't quite see how I could customize any order with a web interface, realistically (food intolerances).
This is harder, but that's why I don't think you can replace all your staff with a web interface - you still need a human in the loop to ask about important things like this.
My phone doesn't have a smudge of ketchup and a spot of sticky dried Coca-Cola on it that get on my thumb.
Also... I can imagine why it could be reasonable to assume my phone might have the same number of germs as the menu... but how on earth do you guarantee it has far more?
> if they update the menus dynamically is fantastic
Until it's the prices that are dynamically updated.
Soon enough they'll use the information collected from your device to look up your income level, how often you've visited in the past, what kinds of things you're most likely to order, etc and use that data to set a price for your menu alone and suddenly you're paying more than the person next to you who is ordering the same thing.
Does that ever happen in the US? 90% of the menus I've seen via QR codes, and more generally online, are out of date. Often by months. I've gotten "sorry we're out ofthat" just as often with the new tech as with the old. I guess it's great that restaurateurs elsewhere get this right - most of the positive comments seem to be from Europe - but for the OP and a significant percentage of HN readers that's clearly not the case.
Same. Depends a lot on how it's done though. Toast is the best that I see regularly. Menus designed for phones, easy to customize orders and pay. Hard to mess up.
I hate QR code menus as they are often poorly implemented.
However, I just experienced a QR code check for the first time. That was really nice .. I scanned the QR code with my iPhone, it downloaded the Toast "app clip", which allowed me to pay the bill with Apple Pay. It was totally seamless and far better than handing my credit card to a server to get lost or cloned.
> It was totally seamless and far better than handing my credit card to a server to get lost or cloned.
In the civilised world, we don’t do that. Instead, the waiter brings a terminal to the table, or if they don’t have any, we go pay at the desk. Nobody gives their card to anyone. That is a problem with much better solutions than online-only menus.
In fairness, that civilised solution is extremely slow. If you have a meal with 10 people want to pay separately... that's a lot of wasted time just waiting for a card machine.
I was pretty shocked when I first went to America and they just took all of our cards into the back. Hilariously insecure but you can't say it wasn't more efficient.
App payment seems like a good solution.
Currently the only reasonable option seems to be for one person to pay and then split the bill on Monzo - that does work well but some people don't have Monzo still.
In the United States they never bring the terminal to the table. I remember the first time I went to Canada being surprised when the waitress did that.
OK but being able to just pay and not waste a waiters time is basically only upside? Sure, if you have a special case you can still ask, but for most people it's just like "OK going to give the money now". No needing a waiter to come run over to the cashier to deal with you on top of everyhting else
QR code menus 99% of the time just link to the website menu (which existed before the QR code for menus became popular, and is still wack). And it usually sucks just as much as it did before.
QR for a check is a beauty. Exact same experience as yours, there is a local restaurant that did it, and I was prepared for the worst. But I scanned the code, it did the Toast app clip, and the entire process was extremely smooth. I went to that restaurant multiple times since then, and I would be lying if I said that the "qr to pay the check using the app clip" didn't at least partially contribute to that.
- You need good signal or connect to wi-fi to pay (not a given in many restaurants)
- The restaurant can get your email address by default when paying with Apple Pay
- Much slower than just tapping my card or phone on the POS
Compared to the waiter walking away with my card, handing me a receipt to sign and top to fill in, I kind of understand the trad-off – but at-the-table POS solutions have existed for many years now.
It isn't "much slower" when you actually account for the time spent waiting for the server to come around, getting their attention to ask for the check, waiting for them to come back with it, waiting for them to do their lap and come back to collect the card, waiting for them to go run it, and finally waiting for the card to come back.
I've only seen this madness in the US. The first time they took my card away from my sight I went with them to see what the heck they were doing. Crazy system, unsafe for no reason, they can bring terminal to you in the same amount of time, no signatures needed either. All of Europe works as you described, few countries in Africa I've been in the same, I wonder how it came to be like this in the US.
I think one reason we don’t use those PoS terminals too often in the US is because of tipping culture. There is this insane expectation to tip at least 18%, and in fact most receipts have suggestions for 18, 20, and 22%. Any time a server has brought me one of those portable PoS terminals, it felt really awkward, as they stare at me thinking about how much tip I should give for the half-ass snooty service. I imagine many others feel this way, which is probably why it’s not popular. I spend quite a bit of time in Europe and have seen more of the PoS terminals used there, but it makes way more sense because there’s no expectation of a tip.
I hugely dislike the POS terminal for exactly this reason: "The waiter brings the POS terminal and you pay at the table."
The experience I dislike goes like this: The server gives you the hand-held terminal and then stands watching you, tapping his/her foot impatiently, while you hurriedly verify the check, then calculate a tip amount under the server's scrutiny. I guess I'm a wimp. With the server's eyes on me, I feel the pressure to tip generously, no matter how poor the service or the overall experience.
By contrast, I find the traditional system, where the server would drop off the paper check for you to examine on your own time, to be private, un-rushed, and less prone to error.
After three decades of paying my restaurant checks without a POS terminal, I've never encountered any monkey business during the brief time the server is in possession of my credit card. Is "restaurant credit-card fraud" really a thing?
Young people now never pay with their cards, they are using phones with NFC function. So the POS terminal is brought to the table, because no one will give their unlocked phone to someone to take away)
Coincidentally I encountered this system for the first time last night. Unfortunately it never finished loading and I embarrassingly had to switch to a physical card after stalling for 30 seconds.
But how does it even work if there are more than one person? Does each person pay for what they order? What if you're inviting someone? Do you have to order in their stead so that their plates show up on your bill? Or can they somehow transfer their orders to your phone?
It seems this is a "solution" to a problem that never existed in the first place.
Here's how it's implemented on the one that's used pretty much everywhere where I live.
Option 1: Everyone orders and pays independently. Website takes payment through all the usual options + Apple/Google pay. So long as the whole table orders within 5 minutes, all the orders come through at once.
Option 2: One person sets up a tab, which generates a QR code. The other guests scan that code instead of the one at the table. People can order their own food/drinks as above until the tab owner closes the tab. If you forget to close the tab it closes itself at the close of business.
This should instead be labeled "the restaurant industry's worst implementation".
Just last night we were trying to order from a restaurant that uses a service called qrfy.com for their menu.
I assume from the URL that this service specializes in this. Despite that the UI is... poor.
The font is too small (probably fine for the 20 something designer that built it). That's not a biggy, but then someone decided to disable pinch zoom.
Being techy, I can show the others how to work around that by doing a screen shot, then looking at the result in the gallery, where zooming does work. That's a crap experience though, because I can only see one page at a time. I just want to browse a menu! And I need to do tech support to show others how to do Android screen grab (gorilla swipe from right to left).
All so very fucking ridiculous for something that could do easily be so much better.
Browsers shouldn't need a setting for this. Whoever decided to allow websites to disable zooming should be shot, along with whoever decided to allow them to disable copy/paste or hijack ctrl-f.
You can try that, but then you get sites where stuff goes flying off the screen when you zoom. Honestly, it’s hard to believe that websites can be so poorly designed, but they are!
If a restaurant wants you to use your phone and proceeds to serve a website that doesn't work on people's phones, that's on them, full stop. Even if the user can accommodate the brokenness, it's still unacceptable that they should ever have to.
Sure, and with physical menus you can bring along a magnifying glass for when they are printed too small. But then, this sort of things are not considered acceptable in the real world, why should we accept them in restaurant websites?
My experience with QR-code menus has been nearly always terrible. Little to no thought goes into the format and presentation for a small screen device. Many restaurants just return a large PDF with microscopic fonts that you have to struggle to read on your small screen.
While some restaurants have a waiter taking orders, others enforce ordering via the same webapp. I've almost always run into problems where the order process hangs, or doesn't go through correctly.
There's a specially nasty surprise on iOS devices. Sure you can use the built-in QR code scanner and it pops up a webapp where you take 10 minutes to struggle through everything.... and now you just want to check that message from your friend to see if he's on the way, quickly switch to your favourite messaging app and then.... anger at not being able to find where the heck your menu and ordering process disappeared, because you didn't know that you should have explicitly ordered your phone to open the page in safari.
When presented with ordering via the web app, you often are just getting whatever the server sees on their tablet, filtered through a simple web interface.
And then you can have fun ordering the True Impossible orders, like using the McDonalds app to buy a cheeseburger with no cheese, no bun, no sauce, no onion, no pickle, and no meat.
Hopefully these restaurants will go extinct via natural selection. It takes so much longer to convince these broken portals to take your order. Which means the restaurant is losing money at peak times.
I'm CTO of a startup in this space so I thought I'd chime in.
Yea completely annoying when you run into a qr code and it opens a menu. we try to encourage our restaurants to offer physical menus as a choice. We want people to use our app based ordering system because we put a lot of effort to make it convenient.
1. its not jsut a menu, you can browse and add food to your bill in real time and the waiter gets a push notification about it. its integrated with teh ticketing system so it really cuts down on wrong orders. what you see in the app is what the chef sees in the kitchen.
2 ordering between friends. we make it so you can invite and see a giant list with who ordered what in realtime.
3 hail the waiter from the app. with our system, the waiter gets a push notification if you hail them from a button in the app or add an item. no more awkwardly trying to get the waiter's by looking in their direction and locking eyes awkwardly like two grindr matches in a small midwestern city.
4. pay through the app. so far customers love it. they can simply pay and go instead of waiting for the waiter to bring the machine.
5 registering nor required, we saw that a lot of users were avoiding using the app simply because they didn't wan to register so we made special "lite versions" of our apps that load via instant app (android) or app clips (ios). Thls it sucks that it means we don't get to have a history of what the orders over time, we decided it was better that the system be as convenient as possible. hopefully other nice features like having your payment method stored so you can pay at table without pulling out your card gives people a reason to try the full fat experience
we're in 163 restaurants and growing in London so hopefully you be using us soon!
The value to having something like this is pretty clear but I can't reconcile it with the fact that I don't want to be using my phone at all when socializing with friends and I prefer they didn't as well.
In my opinion there is no better interface for communication than human-to-human speech. This is why butlers, waiters, and personal assistants exist, and also why natural-language AI is promising.
In my opinion we should aim to get screens out of our lives except when necessary and intentionally focused on a task (i.e. work) and maintain presence in the real world whenever we're doing anything else. This means leaning more on human language and less on screens.
To be honest tapping my order on my phone seems much better than through a waiter or even something like a per table Alexa.
I really dislike how often communication gets cut off because multiple participants are trying to get the attention of a waiter or the topic is uncomfortable to talk about with an unknown person over your shoulder.
My experience with paying through the app has been pretty subpar. Usually I'm required to type in my credit card by hand, on my phone. Yuck. If I have to use some app / website to order food at your restaurant it better support Apple/Google Pay.
Edit: the number one thing users want in a restaurant ordering system is ease. I'm in a restaurant to relax, eat, and enjoy good company. The last thing I want to do is register for get another app (because none of the restaurants use the same one) and type in my payment details. Some of the things you mention do sound more convenient than the traditional paper menu and human waiter, but if I have to type in a credit card number or sign up for an account, I'd prefer the human.
I've used the iPad/tablet systems at airports. They usually work great.
What I don't like, however, are:
• Full-screen ads that you need to scroll past, to get at the menu.
• Request/Requirement to sign up an account (even if less "in your face," it's still creepy as hell, because this crowd, especially, knows exactly what will happen to that data).
• Enticements to "download our app." I have stopped downloading these apps, because, in the best case, they are watered-down Web pages, and in the worst case, borderline malware (why does a menu app require all my contacts and pictures?).
• Awful information architecture, that makes it difficult to find what you need (with a paper menu, it's less than a second. With a phone menu, it can take ten seconds or more, and, on a couple of occasions, I never found something that I knew the restaurant had).
Phones aren't iPads. The systems frequently seem to have been designed for tablets, and often, the phone experience is a watered-down, "lesser" experience to a tablet.
I'm really big on end-user experience optimization (as opposed to app developer experience optimization), so I know that I'm a cranky customer.
None of those 5 things are about focusing dinner attention in an enjoyable meal. I came to eat and talk, not mess around in a computer doing the staff's work for them.
"no more awkwardly trying to get the waiter's by looking in their direction and locking eyes awkwardly like two grindr matches in a small midwestern city."
Hum, what? Since when is looking people in the eye to catch their attention awkward?
Pretending to solve made up problems is better PR than honesty.
A more honest take would be "This will grow our and our b2b customers bottom lines, at the expense of the consumer experience. Most consumers won't have a choice if we get enough of the market."
Nah, it's an app trying to sneak in price increase you won't notice.
The only reason for computerized menus is to avoid the menu effect", to raise prices more quickly.
For outdoor picnic table style dining it's my new preference. The ability to easily leave a tab open and progressively order food and drinks on demand is amazing.
Not that it should replace all dining experiences but wait staff free dining when ordering from a bar + kitchen is superior for these instances.
The ability to just get up an walk off without synchronous negotiation is a more relaxed dining experience, the ability to have people progressively join and leave your party is also fantastic and can facilitate an old school community dining hall experience.
There are a few UIs I like for mobile, many are quite poor though.
I hate QR menu's. Younger me is absolutely appalled at that. Older me just wants a physical menu.
* I intentionally don't use my phone at restaurants. In fact, I often prefer to leave it in the car.
* In my area (rural America), a lot of businesses have really poor websites (noticeably worse than urban areas). Nearly all of the QR menus are down right terrible.
* There's a good chance some one thought it'd be great to have a bunch of collapsed sections and add a terrible animation. I need to manually expand each section and deal with the terrible animation repositioning the screen.
* For those less tech savvy businesses, they probably just uploaded a PDF of their menu. Bonus points if the menu is scanned in on their 15 year old printer/scanner combo.
* Finally, there's the group of restaurants that have changed menus but either (1) forget to update the website (2) accidentally have multiple, differing copies of the menu
Bonus points for the menu PDF file being hundreds of megabytes because it's their high res file for the printing company. Double bonus if their restaurant is a mobile service dead zone.
And needing a lot of panning and zooming due to being based on a full page format which is unsuitable for a phone.
It also feels awkward because you stimulate everyone to pick up their phone as soon as you come in. I'm still from the generation that considers that something too avoid :)
You've got it backwards. The big files are menus that have been scanned with no compression at high resolution. Most of that info is vector/font on a properly designed menu.
I was at a food court a couple of months ago (sorry... "food hall") and one of the stalls didn't have a printed menu at all. Not even one available on request. Just a QR code.
> they probably just uploaded a PDF of their menu.
Tbh, this is usually the least bad outcome with QR code menus since at least it's usually just the same as the physical one but on my screen (worse than physical, but not "badly designed JavaScript animation hell" worse) *
Website is easier to translate and likely quicker to load. Search is similar whether its pdf or website.
I like qr codes as an option.
It all varies by context of course, but I much prefer ordering uk/nz style - order at the bar, pay, grab drinks yourself, food gets delivered by waiter. Much faster, esp when you are getting a single cup of coffee.
Exactly the same sentiments. My family is zero phones when eating, whether home or out.
Luckily, most places would bring a physical menu when asked. One claimed they didn't have any, and seemingly made no effort to accommodate, so they just lost our business. At minimum, I don't think it's too much to ask for a single chalkboard or screen or something. Having nothing and demanding users scan QR codes is low effort.
I'm luckily in a rural area where we still have washable menus (literally printed on dishwasher-proof plastic) and I've not seen a QR code ... well, ever.
And the tide is turning, the waiter at a high-class joint we went to in another big city noticed some hesitation with the QR code and revealed normal menus.
There are many services that provide nice web menus for the restaurants to use with QR Codes. The terrible state of any restaurant menu would be only because the restaurant is not aware of the service and the service providers failed to market their product to them.
Do you hate all QR menus or only the dysfunctional ones?
Most are terrible , but occasionally it’s a light web application where I can order and pay directly from. Which I like very much. I do dread the scanned menu PDFs though, they’re crimes against humanity
Readit News
- No extra app. People scan the QR in WeChat (everybody has it) on the table, it will call a mini-app dynamically (somewhat similar to React Native but interpreted in WeChat).
- You are putting orders directly.
- You are paying within WeChat as well so it's seamless.
- The app is smooth because almost every restaurant is using the takeout giant Meituan's mini-app.
- Almost every single restaurants in China is tech savvy enough to use those systems because it's already a take-out centered society. Restaurants not leveraging these systems have virtually zero chance to survive the competition.
- You don't have to wait for anything or talk to anybody in the whole process.
The problems people mentioned in this thread:
- Minorities, people without smart phone or those are less tech savvy, are left behind.
- The walled garden and monopolies and such.
These problems are real, but it's probably not the QR menu to blame, because it's a far greater problem - in China, you are not allow to go anywhere without WeChat and scanning QR code due to those draconian regulations.
What I don't understand is if you're just going to order off an app, what's the point of even going to the restaurant in the first place? That no-human-contact experience already exists in delivery apps, so why bother leaving your home or office if when you go out you just end up with the exact same experience? It's not like most of these restaurants are snazzy KTVs or tea houses where you get a private room and bottle service, they're just bog-standard food court style restaurants with hard chairs and dirty floors. You could just as easily order online and eat the food on a park bench. To me the whole thing just came across as inconvenient at best and actively destructive of local communities and their social restaurant culture at worst.
You cannot have the whole menu in front of you, you have to scroll and change sections. If it's cold, you can't order without talking your gloves off, if it's sunny, you better have a very bright phone or the menu will be unreadable.
As everything in China, you cannot pay without being electronically tracked, and you can't give a tip without going through a system that will likely take a cut. I will refrain to reach the Godwin point here since I assume it's been debated ad nausaum.
And of course, if something is not on the menu, you can't order it.
As usually with systems that are 100% digital, it gives you zero margin of maneuver outside of the happy path.
I don't want every restaurant to turn into a Mac Donald. If I want Mac Donald's, I go there.
... That's how it works right? The menu shows what they are offering and then you pay them. Why would you expect things not in the menu?
And if you don't have a smartphone, you can still just talk to the staff and order with them.
I like that this lets restaurants improve their labour productivity and lower their labour costs. It's hard to run a profitable restaurant.
I didn't come to a restaurant to fiddle with my phone for 5 to 10 minutes
> You don't have talk to anybody in the whole process.
That's a negative not a positive.
For the menu no app is needed, the places I go always open a web page menu(provided by a service specialising in this particular niche).
The payment could be completed through things like Apple Pay, per table basis. So you scan a QR code, it instantly opens a session for you and you can start ordering things and once you are done you close the session by paying through some payment processor.
Also, the technology to open apps with temporary sessions without installing the app exist both on iOS and Android but for some reason it never got popular.
It is my custom to withold payment for a restaurant meal until I've finished eating it and am ready to leave.
Went to several restaurants, took the train, stayed at a hotel. I didn't have to use my phone even once for anything.
As a tourist, the only adjustment I had to make was how comfortable things were and polite people were.
Also can't find any proof that they are still a thing... except for this[2] sketchy looking app that has 1 billion+ downloads, offered by "Google Play Store"
[1] https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/7683278
[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
I was prompted with one of those App Clip interfaces, double-clicked to approve the Apple Pay, and done.
It was such a nice experience, no nagging prompts forcing me to download some crappy App. Just a simple clean, Apple Pay checkout.
Note I agree with TFA about QR menus. But this level of phone integration was the perfect amount on top of a traditional dining experience.
Not a great experience.
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My MVP solves quite a few of the grumbles people mention, and other grumbles either dictate the sort of venues that shouldn't adopt this tech, or show why this tech should always be as well as traditional service not "instead of". (There are also some grumbles that require more development to iron out)
Stuff my MVP does that solve grumbles mentioned in this thread: - simple URL format means you can use the URL rather than scan a QR code. If the restaurant name is long, a shorter version of the name should be used for good UX. I see QR codes that point to those URLs, as a good and easy option to provide for those people who now expect a QR code, but not the main way to access the menu. - web based means no need to install an app (I have also met some of the basic requirements for a "Progressive Web App" so some browsers will let you save it to your device once you are on the website if you want) - I keep file-sizes low, and put thought and effort into making it load and continue functioning smoothly even over slow and patchy internet connections. There are some things I could do to improve performance and smoothness on poor connections, particularly during building up your order, but it was easy to make it so that you can browse a menu to your hearts content even if your connection drops completely right after page load. Right now data for entire menu comes over at page load as JSON (that was created when restaurant last changed their menu), all UI up to placing order is handled in one page via client side JS, then as you add items to your order ajax calls add those items to a WooCommerce cart and tapping order sends you to a WordPress/WooCommerce checkout screen. Extra dev time to make a buffered version of that system, would get the connection need down to just the pageload and checkout/pay, but with the basic setup I have right now there is also need for a connection each time you add an item. The MVP setup would also require restaurants to have their woocommerce orders page up on some device behind the bar, which is not a great UI for their needs - so a "full" version of the web-app would need a custom page, and only use WooCommerce as a back-end if that made sense for that restaurant.
> - Minorities, people without smart phone or those are less tech savvy, are left behind.
I really do not understand how this isn't racist. Do they literally block you from using it if you aren't the major ethnic group?
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Keep a few backup printouts for those who need them (like your phone gets no signal), but otherwise it's a fantastic step forwards. Goodbye to grimy wasteful printouts.
Plus the bonus of never having to experience "oh sorry we're out of that" if they update the menus dynamically is fantastic.
And then you keep scrolling back and forth on your iPhone trying to read them.
Bonus points if you put the pdf in an iFrame in a site that’s off the bootstrap template but they forgot to include the js file so it zooms the hamburger button instead of the pdf when you pinch and refreshes the page when you jerk it too much.
It’s remarkable how particular non-IT industries attract personalities that are more or less technically averse than others. Arts and media, retail, building contractors: generally quite competent. Lawyers, medical: usually pretty bad.
Restauranteurs: the most technically inept grandparent you’ve ever encountered, the one who insists that if they ever touch a mouse it will catch on fire, and then somehow proves it
Edit: Downvotes? For simply sharing my conflicting experience? Okay.
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>when they're printing hundreds of fresh menus a day
They change the menu every day? Around here the menus are commonly placed in a book alike folder or the least they will have a plastic slip. As for waste the online part (with datacenters and all) would be more wasteful/less green.
>Plus the bonus of never having to experience "oh sorry we're out of that" if they update the menus dynamically is fantastic.
So they need to link the kitchen to the menu system in real time. That feels unliklely - most of the menus would mostly static web (or worse pdf) interfaces, and an order button.
You say that like it's a given, but why? Products that can dynamically update the menu when something is out of stock with a couple of touches from FOH staff already exist. It's not exactly complex.
> I don't quite see how I could customize any order with a web interface, realistically (food intolerances).
This is harder, but that's why I don't think you can replace all your staff with a web interface - you still need a human in the loop to ask about important things like this.
And yet it's almost guaranteed that your phone has far more germs and bacteria on it than those menus
Also... I can imagine why it could be reasonable to assume my phone might have the same number of germs as the menu... but how on earth do you guarantee it has far more?
Until it's the prices that are dynamically updated.
Soon enough they'll use the information collected from your device to look up your income level, how often you've visited in the past, what kinds of things you're most likely to order, etc and use that data to set a price for your menu alone and suddenly you're paying more than the person next to you who is ordering the same thing.
Does that ever happen in the US? 90% of the menus I've seen via QR codes, and more generally online, are out of date. Often by months. I've gotten "sorry we're out ofthat" just as often with the new tech as with the old. I guess it's great that restaurateurs elsewhere get this right - most of the positive comments seem to be from Europe - but for the OP and a significant percentage of HN readers that's clearly not the case.
The hostess is supposed to seat you with them
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However, I just experienced a QR code check for the first time. That was really nice .. I scanned the QR code with my iPhone, it downloaded the Toast "app clip", which allowed me to pay the bill with Apple Pay. It was totally seamless and far better than handing my credit card to a server to get lost or cloned.
In the civilised world, we don’t do that. Instead, the waiter brings a terminal to the table, or if they don’t have any, we go pay at the desk. Nobody gives their card to anyone. That is a problem with much better solutions than online-only menus.
I was pretty shocked when I first went to America and they just took all of our cards into the back. Hilariously insecure but you can't say it wasn't more efficient.
App payment seems like a good solution.
Currently the only reasonable option seems to be for one person to pay and then split the bill on Monzo - that does work well but some people don't have Monzo still.
QR code menus 99% of the time just link to the website menu (which existed before the QR code for menus became popular, and is still wack). And it usually sucks just as much as it did before.
QR for a check is a beauty. Exact same experience as yours, there is a local restaurant that did it, and I was prepared for the worst. But I scanned the code, it did the Toast app clip, and the entire process was extremely smooth. I went to that restaurant multiple times since then, and I would be lying if I said that the "qr to pay the check using the app clip" didn't at least partially contribute to that.
- You need good signal or connect to wi-fi to pay (not a given in many restaurants)
- The restaurant can get your email address by default when paying with Apple Pay
- Much slower than just tapping my card or phone on the POS
Compared to the waiter walking away with my card, handing me a receipt to sign and top to fill in, I kind of understand the trad-off – but at-the-table POS solutions have existed for many years now.
Can you provide any evidence of this?
In most countries I've been the waiter brings the PoS terminal to you and you pay at the table.
The experience I dislike goes like this: The server gives you the hand-held terminal and then stands watching you, tapping his/her foot impatiently, while you hurriedly verify the check, then calculate a tip amount under the server's scrutiny. I guess I'm a wimp. With the server's eyes on me, I feel the pressure to tip generously, no matter how poor the service or the overall experience.
By contrast, I find the traditional system, where the server would drop off the paper check for you to examine on your own time, to be private, un-rushed, and less prone to error.
After three decades of paying my restaurant checks without a POS terminal, I've never encountered any monkey business during the brief time the server is in possession of my credit card. Is "restaurant credit-card fraud" really a thing?
We've had this in America for over a decade at big chain suburban restaurants like Ruby Tuesday's and Applebees.
In Poland we have Blik[1] for that, it's a national, standard payment process. Works with any bank, in any restaurant, no need to download an app.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blik
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Holy heck! People do still give their credit cards to strangers to dissapear with? I last saw that in the 90's (Europe).
Or if the staff lose interest and you want to leave and keep asking for the bill (seems to happen if you don't order alcohol)
I wish it was built into the AOSP camera app, but it's not.
It seems this is a "solution" to a problem that never existed in the first place.
Option 1: Everyone orders and pays independently. Website takes payment through all the usual options + Apple/Google pay. So long as the whole table orders within 5 minutes, all the orders come through at once.
Option 2: One person sets up a tab, which generates a QR code. The other guests scan that code instead of the one at the table. People can order their own food/drinks as above until the tab owner closes the tab. If you forget to close the tab it closes itself at the close of business.
It took me quite a while to work out who was checking on the QR code.
Just last night we were trying to order from a restaurant that uses a service called qrfy.com for their menu.
I assume from the URL that this service specializes in this. Despite that the UI is... poor.
The font is too small (probably fine for the 20 something designer that built it). That's not a biggy, but then someone decided to disable pinch zoom.
Being techy, I can show the others how to work around that by doing a screen shot, then looking at the result in the gallery, where zooming does work. That's a crap experience though, because I can only see one page at a time. I just want to browse a menu! And I need to do tech support to show others how to do Android screen grab (gorilla swipe from right to left).
All so very fucking ridiculous for something that could do easily be so much better.
On an iPhone you just tap an aA font icon in the URL bar and change the font size up or down from 100%.
While some restaurants have a waiter taking orders, others enforce ordering via the same webapp. I've almost always run into problems where the order process hangs, or doesn't go through correctly.
There's a specially nasty surprise on iOS devices. Sure you can use the built-in QR code scanner and it pops up a webapp where you take 10 minutes to struggle through everything.... and now you just want to check that message from your friend to see if he's on the way, quickly switch to your favourite messaging app and then.... anger at not being able to find where the heck your menu and ordering process disappeared, because you didn't know that you should have explicitly ordered your phone to open the page in safari.
And then you can have fun ordering the True Impossible orders, like using the McDonalds app to buy a cheeseburger with no cheese, no bun, no sauce, no onion, no pickle, and no meat.
Hopefully these restaurants will go extinct via natural selection. It takes so much longer to convince these broken portals to take your order. Which means the restaurant is losing money at peak times.
Yea completely annoying when you run into a qr code and it opens a menu. we try to encourage our restaurants to offer physical menus as a choice. We want people to use our app based ordering system because we put a lot of effort to make it convenient.
1. its not jsut a menu, you can browse and add food to your bill in real time and the waiter gets a push notification about it. its integrated with teh ticketing system so it really cuts down on wrong orders. what you see in the app is what the chef sees in the kitchen.
2 ordering between friends. we make it so you can invite and see a giant list with who ordered what in realtime.
3 hail the waiter from the app. with our system, the waiter gets a push notification if you hail them from a button in the app or add an item. no more awkwardly trying to get the waiter's by looking in their direction and locking eyes awkwardly like two grindr matches in a small midwestern city.
4. pay through the app. so far customers love it. they can simply pay and go instead of waiting for the waiter to bring the machine.
5 registering nor required, we saw that a lot of users were avoiding using the app simply because they didn't wan to register so we made special "lite versions" of our apps that load via instant app (android) or app clips (ios). Thls it sucks that it means we don't get to have a history of what the orders over time, we decided it was better that the system be as convenient as possible. hopefully other nice features like having your payment method stored so you can pay at table without pulling out your card gives people a reason to try the full fat experience
we're in 163 restaurants and growing in London so hopefully you be using us soon!
In my opinion there is no better interface for communication than human-to-human speech. This is why butlers, waiters, and personal assistants exist, and also why natural-language AI is promising.
In my opinion we should aim to get screens out of our lives except when necessary and intentionally focused on a task (i.e. work) and maintain presence in the real world whenever we're doing anything else. This means leaning more on human language and less on screens.
I really dislike how often communication gets cut off because multiple participants are trying to get the attention of a waiter or the topic is uncomfortable to talk about with an unknown person over your shoulder.
Edit: the number one thing users want in a restaurant ordering system is ease. I'm in a restaurant to relax, eat, and enjoy good company. The last thing I want to do is register for get another app (because none of the restaurants use the same one) and type in my payment details. Some of the things you mention do sound more convenient than the traditional paper menu and human waiter, but if I have to type in a credit card number or sign up for an account, I'd prefer the human.
What I don't like, however, are:
• Full-screen ads that you need to scroll past, to get at the menu.
• Request/Requirement to sign up an account (even if less "in your face," it's still creepy as hell, because this crowd, especially, knows exactly what will happen to that data).
• Enticements to "download our app." I have stopped downloading these apps, because, in the best case, they are watered-down Web pages, and in the worst case, borderline malware (why does a menu app require all my contacts and pictures?).
• Awful information architecture, that makes it difficult to find what you need (with a paper menu, it's less than a second. With a phone menu, it can take ten seconds or more, and, on a couple of occasions, I never found something that I knew the restaurant had).
Phones aren't iPads. The systems frequently seem to have been designed for tablets, and often, the phone experience is a watered-down, "lesser" experience to a tablet.
I'm really big on end-user experience optimization (as opposed to app developer experience optimization), so I know that I'm a cranky customer.
Hum, what? Since when is looking people in the eye to catch their attention awkward?
A more honest take would be "This will grow our and our b2b customers bottom lines, at the expense of the consumer experience. Most consumers won't have a choice if we get enough of the market."
Honesty doesn't sell when you're a parasite.
Usually a pdf, and one that hasn't been updated in a couple of years.
Not that it should replace all dining experiences but wait staff free dining when ordering from a bar + kitchen is superior for these instances.
The ability to just get up an walk off without synchronous negotiation is a more relaxed dining experience, the ability to have people progressively join and leave your party is also fantastic and can facilitate an old school community dining hall experience.
There are a few UIs I like for mobile, many are quite poor though.
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* I intentionally don't use my phone at restaurants. In fact, I often prefer to leave it in the car.
* In my area (rural America), a lot of businesses have really poor websites (noticeably worse than urban areas). Nearly all of the QR menus are down right terrible.
* There's a good chance some one thought it'd be great to have a bunch of collapsed sections and add a terrible animation. I need to manually expand each section and deal with the terrible animation repositioning the screen.
* For those less tech savvy businesses, they probably just uploaded a PDF of their menu. Bonus points if the menu is scanned in on their 15 year old printer/scanner combo.
* Finally, there's the group of restaurants that have changed menus but either (1) forget to update the website (2) accidentally have multiple, differing copies of the menu
It also feels awkward because you stimulate everyone to pick up their phone as soon as you come in. I'm still from the generation that considers that something too avoid :)
Just print a few hundred pieces of paper, and your customers will tell your employees which listed items they want.
I went to another stall.
Tbh, this is usually the least bad outcome with QR code menus since at least it's usually just the same as the physical one but on my screen (worse than physical, but not "badly designed JavaScript animation hell" worse) *
I like qr codes as an option.
It all varies by context of course, but I much prefer ordering uk/nz style - order at the bar, pay, grab drinks yourself, food gets delivered by waiter. Much faster, esp when you are getting a single cup of coffee.
Luckily, most places would bring a physical menu when asked. One claimed they didn't have any, and seemingly made no effort to accommodate, so they just lost our business. At minimum, I don't think it's too much to ask for a single chalkboard or screen or something. Having nothing and demanding users scan QR codes is low effort.
And the tide is turning, the waiter at a high-class joint we went to in another big city noticed some hesitation with the QR code and revealed normal menus.
It's compounded by the fact that I currently use a Unihertz Titan Pocket. Physical keyboard, but only a 3" screen.
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