Blend: Reimagine the Café Tipping Experience.

Timeline

Apr - May 2024

Team Size

5

What I delivered

User Research & Synthesis

Conducted contextual inquiries and semi-structured interviews and synthesized findings.

-->

Service Design

Crafted journey map and service blueprint to visualize user flow across touchpoints.

-->

UI Design

Wireframed user flows and high-fidelity prototypes for the final design.

-->

Final Prototype

Introduce Blend

POS Sytem: Customer Interface

Custom tipping slider and "Tip Later" option enable simple and socially comfortable tipping interactions.

POS System: Employee Interface

Assigning baristas to specific orders and real-time "Thank you" messages from tipping cusomters.

Blend App: Initiate Tipping

Receive real-time notifications on order status and tip your favorite barista anywhere anytime.

Blend App: Personalized Tipping and Rewards

Send a personal "Thank You" message to the barista, browse your café visit history, and redeem reward points.

Blend App: For the Baristas

At the end of their shift, each barista gets to view their tip earnings of the day as well as all the appreciation messages.

Background

Our secondary research revealed that today's café tipping culture is driven more by social norms than by rewarding service, which diminishes its intended meaning and creates social discomfort.

We identified an opportunity to focus on the role of human interaction in voluntary monetary exchanges and improve the tipping experience of both café customers and baristas.

●  ●  To final design  ->

01.
Fieldwork Investigations and Synthesis
‍

02.
Problem Defining and Opportunity Searching
‍

03.
Experience Prototyping and Iterations
‍

Contextual Inquiries

01. Tipping Experiences of Customers and Baristas

To collect both attitudinal and behavioral data of the tipping experience, we conducted contextual inquiries with seated customers and working baristas at 4 cafés, using the following research questions.

●  What are the thoughts and feelings of café baristas and customers at various stages of the service?

●  How do the customers' attitudes and behaviors influence their approach to tipping?

●  What are the pain points of the tipping process from both perspectives?

Interviewed café manager explaining the setup of café POS interfaces.

Affinity Mapping

Understanding Behaviors and Values

We placed equal emphasis on the perspectives of both the service recipient and the provider when theming our data. This approach allowed us to better identify overlaps as well as misalignments.
‍
It became clear to me that the points of friction went beyond just the tipping interface itself. I steered the team towards adopting a service design lens, advocating for a holistic examination of the overall café experience across various touchpoints.

● Key Findings (Customers)

Customers tend to tip regardless of preferences, diminishing the intention behind tipping.

"I tip because I’m supposed to, not because I fully agree
with tipping culture."—  Customer 2

Customers experience social discomfort when tipping at the POS touchpoint.

"I feel pressure when server is standing there waiting for me to go through the check out and tips."—  Customer 5

Customers want to ensure that their tips go directly to the service providers.

"I like to tip in cash because I know that employees receive different amounts of the tip from digital vs. physical."—  Customer 4

● Key Findings (Baristas)

Baristas believe that the tip should correlate with service quality.

"I would tip based on how much time they take for one drink and the human interaction when ordering."—  Barista 3

The tipping process also creates social discomfort for the baristas.

"I feel awkward when turning the iPad around to customers."—  Barista 2

Baristas believe that people should tip because there is a human-facing service involved.

"People should tip since it’s hands on service... there is more work involved."—  Barista 3

How-might-we Statement and Design Principles

02. Defining the Problem

Based on the key findings, we scoped our design problem into a challenge statement and developed a set of guiding design principles. Aligning with my advocacy for a service design approach, these frameworks would be used to evaluate individual touchpoints from the perspectives of customers and baristas, as well as to assess the overall cafe experience.

HOW-MIGHT-WE STATEMENT

How might we redesign the tipping experience of cafés to be more meaningful for customers and more rewarding for employees?

FOR CUSTOMERS

● Restore customer discretion and agency over tipping practices

FOR BARISTAS

● Ensure that receiving tips is rewarding and acts as a motivator for service quality

FOR BOTH

● Alleviate social discomfort associated with tipping
● Highlight human-centered service aspects

Ideation

Bodystorming and Service Walkthrough

I organized a service walkthrough session (Blomkvist, 2012) that simulates the entire café experience using bodystorming techniques.

This process allowed us to generate a wide range of ideas and eventaully align on a concept that we believed could effectively address our design principles — a redesigned tipping experience that enables customers to self-direct tipping post-service.

Journey Mapping & Service Blueprint

Building the Experience

The 'tip later' concept reorders the traditional tipping sequence, allowing customers to tip after receiving their drink and experiencing the service. To visualize this concept, I created a customer journey map highlighting key touchpoints. This map guided our team during the upcoming experience prototype testing by detailing the physical setup and the sequence of actions from the customer's point of view.

●  See Final Service Blueprint  ->

POS Interface:
I designed the initial POS interface to offer customers a clear choice between tipping now or later. For those selecting "tip later," the ending screen includes a brief animation demonstrating how to tip at their convenience.

Custom Tip Selectors:
To reduce discomfort associated with predetermined tip amounts, I designed two custom tip selectors for the "tip now" option. These designs aim to provide greater customer agency and will be A/B tested for effectiveness.

Mobile Tipping Interface:
The touchpoints where customers need to access the tipping service at their own pace necessitated the design of a series of mobile interfaces. The initial wireframe sequence features tipping for specfic employees, personal message, and reward points.

Prototype Testing

03. Evaluating the Experience

We mocked up a café space to conduct three rounds of testing sessions. These sessions aimed to investigate general reactions and thoughts regarding the "tip later" feature, identify any potential points of friction or confusion throughout the service flow, and evaluate the usability of the custom point-of-sale screens and the tipping flow within the mobile app.

●  See Session Scripts  ->

Finding 01
There was confusion on what the “maybe later” option meant, and how it could be accomplished on the POS system.

Finding 02
Participants liked the level of control the custom POS tipping slider suggests but felt that it lacked precision.

Finding 03
Participants expressed a desire to view their total star count and track their progress towards redeeming rewards.

Recommendation 01
Add QR code animation at the POS touchpoint and improve the overall copywriting.

Recommendation 02
‍Improve the usability of POS tipping slider.
‍

Recommenation 03
Show missing points toward reward milestone at earlier touchpoints.

Prototype Iterations

Updating the Designs

Based on the evaluation recommendations, I worked with other designers on the team to address identified friction points in our updated prototypes. These iterations reinforced our core principles of enhancing customer agency and fostering human connection throughout the tipping experience.

POS Interface Updates:
01. We refined the POS screens with updated copywriting and added the Blend logo to clarify the "tip later" call-to-action.
02. The custom tip selector uses a curved slider to minimize horizontal movement that makes the tipped amount apparent; the plus/minus buttons allows amount to be precisely adjusted.

Mobile Tipping Interface Updates:

❶ Added barista's profile image to humanize the experience of tipping.
❷ Added order breakdown to make payment information more transparent.
❸ Added tip-to-reward conversion to make the loyalty program more transparent.
❹ Introduced “Usual Tip” and “Custom Amount” user flows to help users with their decision making process.

❺ Added reward progress before and after the tipping screen.
❻ Simplified content on home screen to have two cards visible at once, minimizing cognitive overload.
❼ Visually emphasized the tipping call-to-action.
❽ Incoporated information on past visits, including café information, number of orders, and reward status.

Reflection

Striking the right balance between customer goals and business goals would be the next step. While the redesigned experience aimed to alleviate discomfort and enhance human connections for customers and baristas, I recognize that further research on the business of existing payment and reward applications in the market would have informed their design more.

Blend is at its core a B2B solution for cafés. Although the 'tip later' option might initially seem to risk reducing tips, the goal of this proposal is to ultimately increase both net revenue and customer loyalty by emphasizing human connection and enhance the overall service experience. The project's success will be measured holistically, considering net revenue as opposed to just the tipped amount, and the number of returning customers. Focusing on theses metrics ensure that we're creating a more engaging café ecosystem that benefits both businesses and customers in the long term, fostering stronger relationships between baristas and patrons.

●  Next Project: GNSS Management @ Alibaba  ->

Connect.

Linkedin

Instagram

Contact.

peterlin.atelier@gmail.com

646-203-3270