While QSRs are the ones to employ digital menu boards to portray their menus, many fine dining areas too are gradually deciding to employ tablets or TV screens to display a digital menu with HD quality images. However, menus often need constant updates. Hence, one needs a tool with which they can manage the edits in digital menus quickly and easily.

At DotSignage, we decided to develop a ‘Digital Menu App’ that will help them manage updates to digital menus in tablets/TV screens easily. Everything right from creating the menu to handling the categories and item names can be done with ease.

With our intuitive and easy hands on dashboard, you can create and manage the entire menu with listed steps as below.

Steps to create Digital Menu and Digital Menu Boards:

1) Login to the Dashboard of DotSignage. Tap on ‘Menu’ on the left panel. Create your entire menu in this section. Add Categories and items as needed.

2) Tap on App Store on the left panel. Select Digital Menu in the section displayed. Tap on Create Digital Menu.

3) Enter basic details to create the digital menu like name, description, theme (Choose any 1 from two available themes) and auto-scroll. Save the details.

• On a TV or a device that is non-interactive, please take note to turn the Navigation Display to ‘No’. Navigation Display is meant to offer the ability to navigate (or scroll) between the pages. Mostly on TV screens, if you have a one-page menu, make sure that you put the Navigation Display to ‘No’.
• If you have multiple pages in the menu, select ‘Yes’ for Navigation Display. Multiple menu pages can be accessed through the Hamburger icon on the top left of the screen.
• Once the menu is created, it will be listed under the digital menu section.
• Tap on the menu created and scroll below.
• Tap on ‘Create Page’ button. With this you can create the pages in your menu as you need them.

4) Set Menu Configuration and Theme Configuration.

a) Menu Configuration:

• You can display your menu on a single page or multiple pages as you need. Creating multiple pages for your menu offers more readability to it and makes it convenient for customers too if they are using tablets.
• You can choose to display the category names (like Pizza, Pasta, Sandwiches) or not display them at all using the ‘Display Categories Title’. By selecting custom, you can select a few category titles that you selectively want to display.
• The same functioning applies to ‘Start new category from new column’ section. Here every new category can start from a new column instead of continuing after the previous category.
• You can also choose not to display item price/images if need be.
• You can create an interactive menu by enabling the ability of ‘Allow users to click menu item’.
• By doing so, users can tap on any menu item to know more about it like its description, taste, quantity served and the image to know how it will look.

b) Theme Configuration:

• Herein we offer the ability of displaying any colored theme or any image in the background of menu. One can also choose to keep the background transparent (By selecting ‘Yes’ under the background transparent header).
• Select the background color, category/item fonts & size, item description fonts and item time fonts as needed.
• Color selection for fonts of categories and images is also available.
• Fill in the number of seconds you want the image to be displayed in the background under the ‘Image Time Interval’.
• The image to be kept in the background can be taken from ‘Choose from Media Library’.

5) Playlist:

• Once the menus are created, set and configured, tap on the ‘Playlist’ section on the left panel.
• Enter the details of the playlist and tap on ‘Add App’.
• Select the menu to be displayed in the app pop-up with a list of menus and save the details.

6) Scheduler:

• Go the Scheduler section in the left panel and tap on ‘Create Scheduler’.
• Add ‘Regular’ or ‘Event’ based scheduler as per your needs.
• Select the matching playlist for the scheduler and tap on ‘Save & Publish’.

Upon ‘Save & Publish’, the content will be pushed to the linked tablet devices or TV Screens and you are good to go.

A few easy and quick steps to get you started with the Digital Menu in your tablets or TV screens. Do let us know if you have any queries or concerns and feel free to reach us at info@dotsignage.com