Situation
Most small restaurants run their menu in three or four different places at once: a printed menu, a PDF on the website, maybe a QR code, sometimes a third-party delivery listing. Every price change or seasonal swap means updating each of these separately – usually by emailing a designer or wrestling with software that wasn’t built for a busy kitchen.
Coming from a background in hospitality ourselves, we kept seeing the same problem: owners and managers don’t have time, design skills, or a desk to sit at – they need to make a change from their phone, between services, and have it go live everywhere at once.
Objective
Design and build a tool that lets anyone – no design or technical background needed – create and update a restaurant menu from their phone, and publish it instantly as a print-ready PDF, a public web page, and a QR-linked digital menu, all from a single edit.
Approach
Rather than the traditional path – research, Figma mockups, a polished prototype, then months of development followed by user testing – we used a faster, AI-assisted workflow: prototype, build, deploy and test in the same loop, using Claude to help generate and refine working code directly. This let us skip the long mockup-to-build handoff and instead validate ideas against a real menu and a real restaurant owner from day one.
Process
1. Grounding the problem in real hospitality experience Years working in restaurants made the core pain point obvious: menu management is fragmented across formats, and most tools assume a level of design skill or desk-bound time that owners don’t have.
2. Building the core engine Designed a flexible, block-based menu editor – dishes, sections, allergen and dietary tags – that automatically lays itself out for both screen and print, without the user touching a layout tool.
3. Testing on a real, live menu Rather than synthetic user testing, the builder has been shaped directly against Garage Senigallia’s actual menu – real dishes, real edits, real day-to-day use – surfacing practical issues faster than a staged usability test would.
4. Designing mobile-first, by default Every screen in the builder was designed to be fully usable one-handed, on a phone, with no onboarding or manual required.
5. One menu, every output A single saved menu renders into a print-ready PDF, a public hosted web page, and a QR code – so one update goes live everywhere immediately, with no re-exporting or re-uploading.
Takeaways
Faster, realer iteration. Development compressed what would normally be a months-long design-to-build cycle into days, while testing against real data and a real user the entire time.
Real usage beats simulated testing. Building alongside an actual restaurant surfaced friction points – confusing buttons, awkward flows – far quicker than a scripted usability session would have.
Simplicity has to be defended at every step. Designing for “no technical knowledge needed” means constantly stripping back, not adding – every new control has to earn its place on a small screen.
Outcome
Cartafolia is live and in active use for Garage Senigallia’s full menu, with the builder, PDF generation and public web publishing working end-to-end. The product continues to evolve feature-by-feature, driven by real restaurant use rather than a fixed spec.
Notes
This is a self-initiated, ongoing product built in-house at Web Design Mattrs, developed using an experimental AI-assisted workflow rather than a traditional agency process. Screenshots and screen recordings throughout show the builder and published menu in real use.
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