Yen Ching: Menu Redesign

Redesigning the menu of the restaurant was a major part of the Yen Ching’s redesign. The menu of a
restaurant says alot about the way the restaurant wants to be viewed by others and ties into the
organizational level of the restaurant as a whole. Yen Ching’s restaurant menu is very cluttered. It has
too much information about foods and prices and does not do a good job in condensing this information
for those who want to look and order quickly. In today’s time, many people like to be able to find what
they’re looking for with ease and don’t like to read and go through redundant tasks that can be simplified.

Yen Ching’s menu has many different and bold colors. The Front and back page of the menu is bright pink and the words on the front and back are very large. Words on a menu assists in helping guests determine what they would like to eat, and when these words are large and bold, it becomes very overwhelming and that was our general consensus regarding the menu. It was overwhelming to read and very hard to make a decision regarding what to eat.

The first and second page of the menu, which were both red, consists of the lunch options. The third page, which was also printed on red paper, consisted of the specials and combos.The fourth page is yellow and consists of the dinners and royal dinners.The fourth page, which was changed to red again, consists of the soups, appetizers and pork. The fifth page consists of the fowl and beef, the sixth page consists of seafood and vegetables option and the seventh and last page consists of noodles, chow mien or chop suey and fried rice.

The menu has many instances where information and food choices are repeated. Typically, menus begin with the appetizers, then the soups and salads, then it dives into the entrees. The ordering of the menu is perplexing. Many would assume, upon seeing the dinner options on the first page, that the restaurant did not offer appetizers or soups. The order of the menu should be consistent with the order in which people tend to eat, which means the appetizers should come first, then lunch options and then dinner options.

Seeing how the menu looks made me very curious to see their online menu. The online menu was just as bad but also a bit surprising. I intended on seeing bright colors online and words that are hard to read because of the color of the background. Once online, I was shocked to see that Yen Ching’s menu is actually only displayed in black and white! I know, shocker right? The background of the menu is white and the words are black. The main menu page has tabs on top that turn yellow when clicked on. The instore menu is over the top with bold colors and very cluttered while the online menu is too plain but still very cluttered. There are many instances where the same food is repeated on the menu multiple times in different sections.

In order to effectively redesign the menu, I decided to look at different chinese and thai restaurant menus online to see what their menus contained and how they effectively ordered their menu. I was really impressed by Opart Thai’s online menu. Not only do I like the restaurant’s menu, it is one of my favorite places to eat when in the city. I saw that their menu was very simple, straightforward and easy to navigate. Their background color is brown and their words are burgundy and white. Their words aren’t too big and the colors aren’t overwhelming. I used this as inspiration for the redesigning of the menu.

I used Spark Adobe to design the main page of the menu, where people can see the order of the menu and where to visit in order to find what exactly they are looking for. I made sure that the redundancy of the menu was taken out. The menu needs to be simpler so people can look at it and make a decision without feeling bogged down by the words and colors. For the rest of the menu, I used imenupro. Imenupro is a website that allows people to create their own menus and provides different colors, templates and even examples for menu designs. I then went to Yen Ching’s online menu page in order to copy the words and prices and arrange them properly for the redesign but found that the words could not be copied! This then prompted me to type out all of the words from the menu and order them in a way I thought would be best for customers. I found that although this process was long and tedious, it really helped in finding the flaws of the menu and making sure too many items weren’t repeated in different places. I would recommend that the restaurant invest in actual menus. The menus at Yen Ching are just regular paper that are laminated in a folder. An actual menu that is printed properly on “menu paper” will better the experience of dining at Yen Ching.