Como se pensava que líamos os menus:

"Diagram showing the pattern of reading a restaurant menu that was thought to be the industry standard in the restaurant business. This scan path implicates a "sweet spot" just above the center of the right hand page, where it's believed that customers look the longest and gaze most frequently. Restaurants place the items they hope to sell the most in this fabled sweet spot, lying just above the midline on the right-hand page. The sweet spot is just one strategy, along with colorful text and highlighted boxes, which menu designers use to catch a diner's wandering eye."

 Como o novo estudo descobriu que lemos o menu:

"Diagram showing how we read restaurant menus, based on a new eye-tracker study by San Francisco State University Professor Sybil Yang. The research found that customers tend to read a restaurant menu sequentially like a book. These findings challenge years of conventional wisdom in the restaurant industry, which until now, proposed a more complex scan path with a "sweet spot" above the center of the right hand page – an area where customers are thought to look the longest and gaze most frequently. Yang's results found no evidence of menu sweet spots."

Fonte: New study finds no evidence of menu sweet spots, where diners look longest, 1 Fev. 2012