TipOut - Empowering Tipped Employees

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The image on the right was the initial impetus for this project.  It's a Google Sheet that I created for the staff of a midtown restaurant where I worked.  As with previous student projects, I began my research with a Google Forms survey of typical tipped workers.  Oddly, I did not receive as many responses as I would have expected, so as every designer must, I pivoted and adapted.  Much of my research and testing was conducted in person, with staff members at four different venues across New York City.  I found this immediate feedback to be incredibly valuable as it provided great insight into my design iterations. 

Competitive Analysis:

I looked at TipReports.com and the pooled tip add-on offered by Toast, a major POS provider in the hospitality space.  While TipReports.com did provide similar basic functionality, it also suffered from feature bloat and a high price point.  Toast also required an additional expense to utilize the feature, and obviously only users who were already part of the Toast ecosystem could utilize it.  In addition, the Toast feature is primarily aimed at providing tip information to managers, rather than staff.

Typical User Persona:

Gender - Male / Age - 26 / Occupation - Bartender / Residence - Brooklyn

His Story - Like many aspiring creative professionals, he works in hospitality as a bartender to make ends meet.  While some weeks he does very well in tips, other weeks are less productive, which inserts financial instability and unease.  He would love a tool that would help him predict his weekly paycheck in order to more effectively plan his expenditures to help him realize his dreams.

Goals - To continue working hard as a bartender until he can start his career as an artist.

Issues - Lack of accurate paycheck information.  When he's cut from a shift, he really has no idea what his share of the tip pool looks like unless he pesters management to show him records from the shift.

Brand Characteristics:

This was my first project where brand creation played a significant role in my design choices.

I chose to call the app TipOut because it most clearly communicated the reason the tool exists, which is to share tip information among staffers at a given venue.  For my color palette, I was inspired by the evening sky - which, from a broad perspective, implies possibilities.  The phrase, "The sky's the limit," also felt deeply connected to the core concept of gaining financial freedom.

For the app text, I chose Lato, which is a Google font.  This typeface allows for high readability along with device compatibility.  In addition, I created a slogan for this project, "The Tip of Your Financial Future," which is both topical, and also provides a small window into my sense of humor.

Below, you will find my mood board.

Usability Testing:

Users were asked to click through the prototype to create an account, submit their tip report, and also to find information regarding the specific formula used for calculating how the tip pool would be divided.  Users indicated that they found the flow logical and informative.

Immediate changes made as a result of this testing included correcting part of the account creation flow to bring the user to the screen they expected, as well as adding more detail to the post-submission tip report.

Overall Experience:

While this project involved a great deal of sketching, trashing, and sketching again, the flow and execution came together very organically.  I leaned much more into the overlay feature of Figma, which not only improved the user experience, but also allowed me to provide additional information with less effort than would be required to create entire screens.

As it is my goal to have this project become fully realized, next steps will include expanding the prototype using Axure to allow users to enter their own data.  There are also additional features such as shift history, adjusting paycheck withholding, and customization of the pooling algorithm that will be incorporated.