Uptip
Role
UX Design
UI Design
Service Design
Print
Team
Colorfy
Date
2020–2021
How uptip works
With uptip, service workers receive their personal unique QR code that customers can scan in order to rate the service and give a cashless tip. This way, service workers receive valuable feedback and higher tips, and customers avoid the struggle of finding the right cash in the right time. Managements get an overview of how their employees perform and can immediately intervene when there has been an unhappy customer, which also avoids bad platform ratings.
The problem with cash tipping
Tipping is customary for many professions and meant to encourage or reward service excellence. Tipping is facing headwinds resulting in reduction of income for many service professionals.
Fewer people have correct change in their wallets to provide an appropriate tip. In fact, 50% of US consumers say they no longer carry cash most of the time.
Covid-19 has accelerated this problem, increasing reluctance to handle cash, perceived to be dirty. The pandemic has also curtailed travel, reducing income for travel industry workers.
Cash tipping often fails to convey quality of service delivered. Since cash tips are untracked, service organisations have gaps in customer data, unable to measure quality delivered and income earned by their employees.
What we wanted to achieve
Establish a trusted tips and rating platform with credibility
Use state of the art technology for a fluent user experience
Differentiate from competitors through a trusted rating system
Become the go-to partner for companies for digital tipping
Make tip giving safer through a touchless and completely digital experience
Understanding the problem
Research methods used were:
Competitive Benchmarking
User interviews with service workers in the hotel industry
Affinity diagrams
User journeys
Key focus areas in user interviews were:
What are the challenges in receiving a good tip?
How are service providers interacting with customers (what touchpoint do they have)?
How are tips distributed, who gets to keep the tip?
What are the needs of service providers for a digital tipping solution?
Style Guide
To achieve a consistent look and feel throughout the app and guarantee a fluent user experience we’ve set up a style guide.
Live and improving
We launched a first MVP webapp in November 2020 in various Hilton, Hyatt and Marriott branches in the US. We've gained a lot of insights from this first phase through live data and interviews with the service workers and managers. After some workshop sessions where we've clustered problems that occurred and came up with ideas on how to solve them, our first native app has finally launched in April 2021 for tip receivers! Our next big step is to adapt uptip more and more for other sectors like hairdressers and beauty salons.
(This was the last state of the project when I left Colorfy in August 2021.)
Used resources
Unsplash / unsplash.com (licence-free)
Adobe Stock / stock.adobe.com (bought licences)
Victoria Lemke for Colorfy GmbH / UpTip, Inc