Contact: Elaine Bible
ebible@sfsu.edu
415-405-3606
San Francisco State University

Eye-Tracker Study Shows How We Read Menus

Caption: Diagram showing how we read restaurant menus, based on a new eye-tracker study by San Francisco State University Professor Sybil Yang. The research found that customers tend to read a restaurant menu sequentially like a book. These findings challenge years of conventional wisdom in the restaurant industry, which until now, proposed a more complex scan path with a "sweet spot" above the center of the right hand page -- an area where customers are thought to look the longest and gaze most frequently. Yang's results found no evidence of menu sweet spots.

Credit: Courtesy of International Journal of Hospitality Management

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Related news release: Do menu 'sweet spots' really exist?