Eye movements on restaurant menus: A revisitation on gaze motion and consumer scanpaths

Menu designers have based design tactics on roughly applied psychological foundations. In particular, attention and memory-based design placement strategies are founded upon assumptions which necessitate a clear idea of consumer eye movement sequences across restaurant menus. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, a review of academic and practitioner literature is presented to frame the current discussion on gaze motion patterns as applied to restaurant menus. Second, the results of an eye-tracker study are presented as an empirical and more quantitatively analyzed replication of past restaurant gaze-motion studies. Results offer an average menu scanpath, show that observed consumer scanpaths differ from those anecdotally espoused by industry, and suggest traditional menu “sweet spots” may not exist.