Responsive Design in QSRs: Tips and Importance for Scalability

The quick-service restaurant industry has been revolutionized in the past few years. Customers now look for more optionality when ordering food, browsing menus, and researching restaurants. It’s become the new norm fast. In this new era, creating scalable and responsive digital signage designs has never been more important.

In this post, we’ll go over why scaling and responsivity matter. We’ll also offer some pro tips for how to create designs that are more aligned with what the modern QSR customer desires.

The Importance of Scalable and Responsive Designs for Digital Signage in QSRs

Today, many quick service restaurants use their digital signage to fulfill a variety of purposes. These menu boards and self-service ordering kiosks act as a bridge between the in-restaurant experience and digital marketing and branding initiatives.

In order to serve the huge amount of customers that the average QSR receives, the designs for these screens need to be responsive. Customers should be able to access their desired content in whatever ways they prefer, whether that means scanning a QR code and ordering on their phones or choosing between landscape and portrait mode.

Responsive designs are also naturally more scalable. They are capable of functioning across a wide range of devices, settings, and user preferences. This enables QSRs to create a single design and use it across all of the brand’s restaurants.

Creating responsive designs isn’t just about serving the modern customer better. It’s also about reducing overall design time for the QSR brand as a whole. And responsive designs make it easier to scale rapidly while reducing the costs.

How to Make Designs More Scalable and Responsive

Now, let’s look at some approaches a QSR can use to start creating responsive designs.

Understand How Customers Use and Access Your Content

First, it’s important to understand the type of content that your QSR delivers to customers and how they access it. You need a good understanding of this to figure out which aspects of responsivity would be the most important for your brand to adopt.

Embrace Minimalism

Responsive designs also tend to be minimalist in nature. The more images, text, and Javascript that you have on a page, the more factors you need to consider while creating designs that are responsive in every scenario.

When you keep your digital signage designs low-key, it becomes much easier to keep them responsive across the entire brand.

Start with Mobile First

It’s usually a good strategy to start with mobile designs first since they tend to be naturally more responsive to different devices and framing orientations than web-first designs.

When you create a design that’s meant to be viewed on a larger screen, you often have to make tough decisions and sacrifices in order to scale the display down enough to make it responsive enough for mobile devices.

If you start by designing for mobile screens, you’ll be scaling up instead of down. This is much easier to do and allows for more design consistency while requiring fewer trade-offs.

Create Large Buttons

Finally, make sure that any action buttons you create on a design are large enough to be used across any device. You don’t want users with small screens to struggle to engage with a design because that might annoy them. Plus, it wouldn’t be a good look for your brand.

Putting it All Together

If your QSR brand uses digital signage, responsive designs is a must. Not only will they help you deliver better experiences to your customers, but they can also lay the foundation for faster and more affordable scalability moving forward.