We ❤️ Digital Menu Boards

Whether you’re visiting a coffee shop, bar, deli or food truck, there’s a good chance that you will interact with a menu board of some type. It may be a large chalk board, a folding “sandwich board” on the street or a printed poster, but the menu board is always a critical part of the customer journey. The core function is to let consumers know what is available for sale and at what price, but a well-designed menu board can also communicate specials and sales, help with brand positioning and even do double-duty as a work of art.

Issues with Traditional Menu Boards

Traditional menus are generally printed and framed, or handwritten on a chalk board or white board. Printed menus cost you money each time an edit needs to be made, they create waste, and they require labor in order to mount each new version in place. Hand-written menu boards can be beautiful, but they require an artist or at least someone with an excellent creative eye to design and produce them, or to make edits once they are in place. There’s another way to create menu boards, however, that overcomes these challenges.

Why go Digital?

Digital menu boards are exploding in popularity, among small businesses as well as large restaurant chains. Going digital allows a business to put its menu board on any TV or tablet, and make edits to the menu whenever needed. New coffee flavor this month? Out of pistachio ice cream today? Just update your digital menu and push it to all of your screens in seconds via the cloud.

With an advanced digital signage system like XOGO you can even schedule different content / menus to play at different times of day, or on different days of the week. This allows a bar, for instance, to advertise happy hour specials from 4-6pm Monday through Friday and show standard menus the rest of the day, or to display different menus on weekends versus week days. It sounds complicated but in fact, your content can be scheduled in just seconds using the XOGO Manager app (see: advanced content scheduling). Set it up once and then sit back and let your content run on autopilot.

How to Create Digital Menu Boards

XOGO supports the playback of images, videos and URL-based content, so there are a number of options when it comes to creating your menu board content. If you have graphic design skills, you can simply create your menu graphics in your favorite design program (i.e. Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch… even PowerPoint!) and then load them into XOGO as PNG or JPEG files. 

You can even use video, in case you want to include moving elements in your digital menus. In general we would suggest a video of 60 seconds or less, where the menu items/pricing are static and one or more elements in the background or border have slight movement. The key is to draw attention without having so many moving elements that the menu is difficult to read or distracting. 

Getting Your Menu On-Screen

Once your menu board graphics or videos are complete, getting them on-screen is as simple as downloading our free XOGO Player app onto a player device or tablet. When the app is launched it will display a 4-digit PIN code showing that it’s ready to be added to a XOGO account. The user then downloads our other free app, XOGO Manager, and uses it to upload menu board graphics, create a playlist (i.e. “dinner menu”), and to connect one or more player devices. The whole process takes less than five minutes; once a player is successfully added to XOGO Manager, it begins playing your content just seconds later.

Introducing DS Menu: The Ultimate DIY Menu Designer

A lot of small businesses do not have a designer or agency on hand to create their menu board graphics. That’s where our friends at DS Menu come in. Their clever web-based service allows anyone, including those with no graphic design knowledge, to DIY their own digital menu boards and load them into XOGO. 

Users simply create an account at DS Menu and then choose from hundreds of menu board templates. They have options for pizza shops, coffee shops, bars, delis and more, in various resolutions and both portrait and landscape orientations. Simply choose a template and modify the fonts, colors, pricing, the stock photos of food and drinks, etc. to your liking. DS Menu’s browser-based editor doesn’t require any special software or training. When you’ve finished designing your menus, simply save them to your account and then choose which way you’d like to get them into XOGO.

Pro tip: use coupon code xogo-dsm20 to save 10% on any DS Menu service!

DS Menu Option A: Upload PNG/JPEG

For the majority of customers, we recommend downloading your DS Menu boards to your computer in PNG or JPEG format and then uploading them into XOGO so they can be added to a playlist and pushed to your screens. Since XOGO players automatically cache their playlist, your menus will keep playing even if the players later lose Internet connectivity. Anytime you want to change a menu, just upload a new version into XOGO and drop it into your playlist in place of the older version. You can even have multiple versions of a menu pre-made and pre-loaded into XOGO so they are ready to be used in a playlist at any time.

DS Menu Option B: Publish to URL

Instead of downloading your DS Menu graphics and loading them into your XOGO playlists, it’s also possible to publish your menus to a URL, and then add the URL to your XOGO playlist. The advantage here is that any edits you make in DS Menu will automatically show up on your XOGO screens; however, if your player(s) should later lose Internet connectivity for some reason, they won’t be able to pull in the menu webpage until Internet access is restored, so it’s a bit riskier than loading the graphics into XOGO directly.

Additional XOGO Features: Dynamic Content and Sensors

Due to our advanced scheduling tools and ease of setup, XOGO is particularly well-suited for displaying digital menu boards. However, we don’t stop there. Because our platform can display URL-based content, we’ve partnered with dynamic content companies like Seenspire that allow users (for a small fee) to pull in hundreds of infotainment and social media feeds. Choose from news, sports, weather and traffic information, your business’ Facebook or Instagram feeds, and much more. Why not use XOGO to display your menus on one screen, and to pull in fun, automated content on another? (Related: free Covid newsfeeds for your XOGO players).

We are also in the final stages of integrating XOGO with a number of low-cost sensors that can trigger content via our free APIs. In plain English that means XOGO is capable of triggering content immediately when someone picks a product up from a shelf, presses a button, scans an RFID tag or simply when he/she walks within X number of feet from a sensor. This allows our users to create lots of cool scenarios, for example giving a customer more info on a product when he/she picks it up, or recommending products or specials when someone walks into a specific area of your business.

Digital = Hygienic

As hospitality businesses cope with the Covid pandemic, printed menus (especially those at individual tables) have fallen out of favor because they need to be discarded after a single use. By contrast, a digital menu on a screen mounted over a bar, in an entryway or dining room is completely touchless. You can even include a QR code in the corner so your customers can open the menu on their own tablet or smart phone and take it with them to the table, and/or include information on-screen about your business’ mask and social distancing policies. Digital menu boards are completely hygienic, allow for instant edits and eliminate waste!

What does it cost?

One of the most compelling things about XOGO is our freemium pricing model.  Our XOGO Player & XOGO Manager apps are free to download, and you can run one player completely free of charge. The manager app will prompt you to upgrade to a pro account if you add more than one player to your account, or more than 15 items of content. XOGO Pro subscriptions can be purchased via the manager app and cost just $20 per player per month, or $180 per player per year (a 25% savings). An account administrator can add as many users to an account as he/she wants for no additional charge, and our tech support is free as well. Compare this to the price of printing posters regularly or hiring chalkboard artists, and the digital option quickly begins to make economic sense. 

XOGO was designed to run on low-cost hardware as well. Our player app runs on Fire TV devices, Windows PCs, Chrome PCs, Android tablets and more (related: XOGO Hardware Recommendations), while the manager app was designed to run on your own Windows, iOS or Android device. XOGO runs on any TV or display, from inexpensive consumer models to high-end commercial displays and kiosks (related: How to Choose Your Displays).

Summary

Digital menu boards are easy to deploy, can be scheduled to show different content automatically based on the time of day and/or day of the week, and they are less costly in the long run than printed or even handwritten signage. Digital menus can be edited and updated in seconds, and they even support cutting-edge scenarios like sensor integrations. If you’re interested to set up digital menu boards for your business please feel free to download XOGO today and set up your first player for free, check out our FAQs, or contact us with any questions and we’ll be happy to help.