How can we give tipped workers a sense of clarity and control in a constantly fluctuating industry?
Many workers feel a sense of distrust among their team, particularly with their employers. Additionally, most workers end up playing a guessing game to determine how much money they will receive on their next check. Their income changes depending on their income tax situation, how many shifts they worked that week, and how much money they received in tips.
To gather some initial insights and participants for further research, I sent out a survey targeting people who worked in the service industry.
Following survey responses, I reached out to willing participants to dive deeper and learned how it’s truly a dog eat dog world in the industry! There was a common feeling of distrust amongst coworkers and bosses. Most of all, there was a lack of psychological safety.
After a 10-hour on their feet shift (with 0 breaks) dealing with insufferable customers and irate-for-no-reason bosses all day long, these magical humans have to keep track of one tiny piece of receipt paper that holds info on the money they earned towrads their next paycheck.
Initially, I thought having their employers input their tips for them at the end of the day would be a great idea, but after interviewing a few people....I had the wrong idea. There is a lack of trust that exists within this industry.
Through interviews, I also found that there were way more issues than just financially motivated ones within the service industry - so I figured, why not solve for those too? (This project had no constraints and the world was in fact my oyster)
Upon researching other similar products in the market, I learned how split the market was - there were scheduling apps then there were tip monitoring apps but they didn’t do both.
The first few versions felt very childish and weren’t sharp enough to provide the visual trust I needed to develop from the start as a new app so I redesigned the color scheme, typography and iconography to fit based on user feedback and the constructive feedback from a more senior designer. Although I wanted to keep some playful aspects, I needed it to feel more poised.
It was very important for this app to have a personalized onboarding experience as that’s the only way it would work to help show income tax and pay periods, so this was also added for the final iteration.
Watching user after user not find the way to input their tips was very painful to see, but gave me enough insight to go back and fix the usability issues users kept encountering.
I created a very personalised mobile app for tipped workers to track their income, swap their shifts with coworkers and have better control over their lives. The final result passed usability testing with flying colors and has given way for future product opportunities to grow.
In order to properly view information like income taxes and accurate payday the onboarding process needed to be very detailed and personalised.
I included the option to use an Employer Code so that you can easily swap shifts with your coworkers in-app. This also paves the way for a SaaS product as well as a POS product for tips to be automatically input.
Usability testing showed users gravitated to their schedule to input their tips - so I made it easier for them to do so!