Seth's Blog : The menu

The menu

A while ago, I ate in a restaurant that had no menu. The waiter simply walked over to the table and said, “what do you want?” As bold as statement as this is, it made many diners uncomfortable and often led to people ordering without much imagination.

Around the same time, I found myself in an out-of-the-way diner that had an 29 page menu. It took our group a long time to figure out what to order (and then we discovered they were out of just about everything.)

A menu (not just in a restaurant) serves many functions. It’s not simply a list of what you have, it’s also a prompt for what you believe in, want to do or contribute. The menu gives the customer an opportunity to respond, not simply to initiate.

When a prospect asks, “what do you have?” and the answer is “what do you need?” we haven’t made much progress.

Adobe Photoshop is hitting a real menu problem when it comes to AI. Every week, it seems, they announce powerful new features. But they’ve lost whatever coherent menu structure they used to have, and worse, the typical user can’t imagine what to do next.

A disciplined menu structure doesn’t limit user choice, it increases it.