Bring back menus, QR codes are terrible

It's really interesting to see how a crowd of tech workers who generally are trying to pave the way are so quick to attack and be negative.

Like all things in life, when its implemented well it works and when it does not it is terrible. I still think there is room for this to be the future though. I say this as a westerner but perhaps the west is not ready for it yet but I really enjoyed the experience of using QR codes in China. Go to a restaurant I just get shown where to sit and don't need to waste time with the host/server giving me menus or telling me anything. If I have questions they are there to answer the but I can also just sit down, scan the QR code, menu opens up and I can order food. Food just shows up minutes later. When I am done I go to the front and pay with Alipay.

The benefits to me of not having physical menus is huge. From the business perspective there is less interaction time necessary to serve a diner. Sure if this is an upscale high touch experience physical menu is where it stays BUT the majority of dining experiences are not like this. The menu is up to date and easy to modify. Possible to include multiple pictures and information about the food.

I might be wild but I really like the experience and wish more places would adopt it. Like all things I think here in the west its still too new so we have a mixed bag of good and bad implementations. Give it a few years and I think it will be narrowed down to the POS providers who offer it as a feature.

> It's really interesting to see how a crowd of tech workers who generally are trying to pave the way are so quick to attack and be negative.

This statement is utterly useless. It provides no value to the discussion, doesn't make any interesting points, and tries to emotionally manipulate the reader.

> Like all things in life, when its implemented well it works and when it does not it is terrible.

HN readers seem to be bearish on these technologies because they're usually implemented poorly, and there's very little reason to believe that the situation will substantially improve anytime soon (or at all). People generally discriminate between restaurants based on price and food, not menus, so there's little incentive for restaurants to improve electronic menus - similar to business websites - meaning that if QR code menus gain wide adoption, we're extremely likely to see significantly worse experiences near-universally.

Even more so: "a crowd of tech workers who generally are trying to pave the way" are professionally engaged in using, critiquing and developing user interfaces. These are the people you hire to tell you "this wasn't a good idea, here's a better one".

Super-thin phones.

Touch-screen controls in automobiles.

QR codes instead of menus.

All of these things seem nifty to marketing departments, may be accepted by consumers, and are detrimental to actual usage.

> Even more so: "a crowd of tech workers who generally are trying to pave the way" are professionally engaged in using, critiquing and developing user interfaces.

“I don’t like it” is not a critique though. The people you would want to hire could try to answer “here is an imperfect solution, how would you improve it?”

The article gives reasons why it is an imperfect solution.