We were recently commissioned by a fast food company in the US to evaluate several menu designs that could meet this challenge. This is a fast food chain that is especially popular during lunchtimes and among local office workers, where most purchases are takeaways. According to the brief, one of the key problems was the build-up of a queue backlog during peak times. This was not necessarily due to shortage of staff or slowness of the delivery process, but more often caused by the amount of time it took customers to choose their meal. So the solution was to design a new menu board that would cover all of the needs described above, but at the same time help customers in the queue make quicker decisions. The creative team produced six main design themes, based firstly on aesthetics and then on the information conveyed through different kinds of layouts.

To evaluate the visual appeal of the designs we applied our IMPRESS platform, which was designed to deploy and analyse implicit reaction time tests rapidly. This test is used to provide a profile of a design based on a range of attributes, and in this case 30 relevant attributes. By careful selection of attributes it is possible to identify the strengths and weaknesses of a design (and how well each delivers the brand’s values) without directly asking respondents.

 As has been well documented elsewhere, traditional methods of gathering consumer evaluations over-rely on subjective views and there are several problems with this. 

Firstly, respondents may only be consciously aware of global and generalised feelings, but not more specific feelings. It has been argued that self-knowledge is often based on trying to rationalise one’s own behaviour, rather than by having a ‘privileged access’ into one’s deeper feelings. Attitudes and feelings can hence be very difficult to identify and put into words. 

Secondly, respondents may try to appear consistent in their responses. This results in poor discrimination as they assign all of their positive evaluations to the brand they prefer the most and all of the negative evaluations to the brand they prefer the least. Yet in reality, consumers often feel ambivalent towards brands and without a detailed, more discriminative response, a brand will never know its genuine strengths and weaknesses. 

A third problem with relying on subjective methods is that respondents may deliberately try to hide their feelings. This can happen when one is asking about certain behaviours that might be embarrassing, illegal, or socially less acceptable, or even if respondents want to hide their feelings for no obvious reason other than they just do not want to divulge the information.

Done properly, implicit reaction time tests abstract how a respondent feels about the design, brand, and packaging and so on without directly asking them. By presenting words and images on the screen very rapidly and requiring a quick response, it is possible to infer how they feel towards the brand. For this project, we employed our implicit test on each design and on regular customers, lapsed customers, and considerers.

The question concerning how menu information can be presented to maximise customer decisions required us to consider a range of candidate tests. One of the advantages of employing a team of experienced psychologists and neuroscientists is that they have familiarity with a range of cognitive tests, and so they are not restricted to the set of tools most often used in neuromarketing but open to scores of tests used in academia but which can have direct use in consumer research. For this, we identified a scientifically validated test of working memory.

The logic for using this test is this:

Imagine that you have entered a restaurant you have never visited before. You are in the queue, unsure what you want, but your turn to order is rapidly approaching. You look at the menu board. There are so many options…you’re studying the menu board but it looks too much like an Excel spreadsheet. You consider one option and all it has to offer (a brief description, the quantity, its price, the number of calories), and then a second, but by the time you have considered option two, you have forgotten the first. You commit to an option, it might not be your ideal, but at least you got through the ordeal.