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Toast Payments
Increasing tip incomes for restaurant workers during COVID-19
🏢 Company
Toast
🗓 Duration
4 months (2020-2021)
👨🏻💻 Role
Design lead
🧐 Responsibilities
Research, Product Strategy, UX, UI
👨👩👧👧 Team
PM, UX researcher, Engineers, Legal, QA
INTRODUCTION
Over a tens of thousands of restaurant owners in the U.S utilize Toast point of sale (POS) devices to take orders and payments from customers. Tipping screen is a significant part of the customer checkout process, because a restaurant worker’s paycheck heavily relies on whatever the amount customers select on the screen. However, COVID-19 hit restaurant workers hard as tip income in across the U.S have dropped dramatically.
MY ROLE
As the Lead product designer, I led the redesign of tipping screen of the checkout flow for
5 months to increase tip income for restaurant workers during COVID-19.
I worked collaboratively with PM, Engineers, and Legal through out the product development process to ultimately revamp the tipping screen.
PROBLEMS
Tip income for restaurant workers have dropped dramatically as customers were clenching their wallets after the COVID-19 hit the U.S. This raised concerns around potential increase in subscription cancellations that could result in ARR (annual recurring revenue) losses.
SOLUTION
Increase tip income for restaurant workers by streamlining the tipping screen and guiding customers to tip more generously across multiple Toast point of sale devices.
IMPACT
Restaurant workers were extremely satisfied with the significant increase in tip income and faster completion rate. The redesign was successful as tip income increased beyond our goal expectation and more importantly it resolved our concerns about ARR losses.
PROCESS
UNPACKING THE PROBLEM THRU RESEARCH
PM and I collaboratively conducted surveys and interviewed restaurant owners to empathize with their concerns and to investigate the causes of the tip decrease outside of external factors.
👉🏼 Low tip completion rate due to incompletion of tipping task.
🧑🏽🍳
“... some customers walk away without completing the tipping screen when they were prompted to sign on the signature area. That’s a big fat ZERO tip for us.”
👉🏼 Increase in the percentage of “No Tip” option bringing down the average tip income.
Based on the data analytics, we witnessed a dramatic increase in the percentage of the “No Tips” option across the state.
BUSINESS GOALS & METRICS
🎯 Increase in average tip amount
🎯 Increase in completion of tipping screen/task
🎯 Increase in NPS score (customer satisfaction rate)
FIRST ITERATION & TESTING
🧪 Remove “digital signature” to increase tip completion rate
Removing two steps of the tipping task will increase the tip completion rate as customers can complete in one tap (touch). We released the feature change to a small set of Toast customers to minimize the risks.
🔬 Pilot test results
Although we validated that the signature removal has increased the tip completion rate and streamlined the tipping process, we agreed that tip income still needs room for improvement.
SECOND ITERATION & TESTING
🧪 Create a visual hierarchy by making tip options more prominent that to divert customers from clicking on"No tip" option
🧪 Enhance accessibility by enlarging buttons and font sizes for guests with visual impairment
🧪 Flip the order of tip amount (High to Low) to give guests pressure to tip generously against their wishes to benefit the restaurant owners
🔬 Pilot test results
The iteration was successful as tip income increased beyond our goal expectation. Ultimately, we were confident to roll the redesign out to everyone at the end of May.
🚀 LAUNCH 🚀
In January 2021, a small cohort of beta customers was able to test the redesigned tip screen. We slowly released it to more customers as we were paying close attention to the metrics and customer feedback.
In April 2021, we finally launched the redesigned tip screen for all customers after we succeeded in increasing tip income for restaurant workers.
Thank you!
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