This may have been posted here before, but I only just noticed it in the annual roundup. I thought a few other people might be interested. I some of these characteristics could be useful on the pricing page of web software.
Clearly, these sorts of strategies have applications well beyond restaurant menus.<p>About 15 years ago, taking a usability engineering class from Randy Pausch at UVa (yes, that Randy Pausch), I worked with a team that was determined to develop a "cheat sheet" to help CS students debug the awful HP Laserjet IV printers in the UVa CS lab.<p>Think "PC LOAD LETTER?! What the f<i></i>* does that mean?!"<p>After several user rounds of user-testing, we found ourselves using similar tricks. While iterating on documentation that would maximize our users' success, we occasionally found it necessary to provide partial information or even outright lie to the user! While this sounds under-handed, it was done to (1) help the user accomplish their intended goal (e.g., fix the damn printer) and (2) ensure that the user read enough of the instructions to be able to perform the task.<p>In all seriousness, we found that most CS students, unsurprisingly, do not have the patience to RTFM. But we were ultimately successful in tricking them into doing the right things.<p>How we phrased and partitioned the branching instructions turned out to be more important than providing a deep understanding of the printer itself.<p>Then again, some of the solutions to HP LJ IV problems, derived from their awful awful manual, seem like voodoo. ;-)
The decoy pricing trick is easy to spot when pasta is on the menu. Pasta is one of the highest-margin items on the menu, so restaurants will place it next to overpriced chicken dishes. Next to a $12 chicken dish, $9 for pasta seems reasonable, even though the noodles and sauce only cost a few cents.
I think the restaurant with the iPad menus in Japan isn't doing it yet, but if I had a very forward thinking restauranteur friend I would offer to A/B test to victory. Increase average ticket by 10% and you print cash.
I'm pretty sure this has come up here before, but last year NY Mag visually broke down the various 'tricks' in the menu at Balthazar: <a href="http://nymag.com/restaurants/features/62498/" rel="nofollow">http://nymag.com/restaurants/features/62498/</a>
How about if you make diners pay for the menu before they're allowed to order? And also kick them in the nuts while they're reading it. But then you give them the food for free. (This requires pricing the menu appropriately, of course.)