You may be wondering why I, a tech columnist, would write about tips. The reason is that tips are no longer just a socioeconomic and ethical issue about the livelihood of service workers.
It has also become a technology problem that is quickly getting out of control thanks to the proliferation of digital payment products from companies like Square and Toast. Since payment apps and touch screens make it easy for merchants to preset tip amounts, many businesses that didn’t normally ask for tips now do so.
And many consumers feel pressured to comply or don’t notice the charges. This phenomenon, known as “blame tipping,” has worsened in recent years as more privileged professionals have paid more to help essential workers weather the pandemic. But even as businesses have returned to normal, tip requests have remained steady.
Tipping practices can become part of a broader government campaign against so-called junk fees, extra costs that businesses add to products and services and add little or no value. The Federal Trade Commission, which announced an investigation into the practices last year, said people could experience a “junk fare shock” when companies used deceptive technological designs to inflate costs at the end of a purchase.
I have felt the pain and discomfort of seemingly arbitrary tip requests. I was shocked recently when a grocery store iPad screen suggested a tip of between 10 and 30 percent, a situation made more unpleasant when I hit the “no tip” button and the cashier shot me a look.
When a motorcycle mechanic asked for a tip with his smartphone screen, I felt pressured to tip because my safety depended on his services. (She still felt bad, because she had already paid for his work.)
I shared these cases, along with stories I had read all over the web about consumers outraged by abnormal tip requests, with user interface experts who work in technology and financial products. All agreed that while it was a good thing for payment services to increase tips for the service workers who depend on them, the technology created a bad experience when consumers felt coerced by businesses that didn’t normally expect tips.
“If your users aren’t happy, it’s going to come back and bite you,” said Tony Hu, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who teaches courses on product design. “Ideally, they should be tipping for an excellent experience.”
From my conversations with design gurus, there is a silver lining to all of this. By focusing on the technological design aspects of tipping, we can overcome tipping pressure in the same way that we deal with issues like digital privacy. Let me explain.
The devil is in the defaults.
In 2013, Square launched a point of sale product which replaced cash registers by allowing vendors to enter an order on a tablet and customers to swipe a credit card to add their signature and tip. square has saying their products have led to large increases in tips for many businesses. Since then, its technology has been widely copied by many brands, and traditional cash registers are rare to see.
A key success factor for digital payment systems, design experts said, is that they take advantage of a design principle that influences consumer behavior: The default is the path of least resistance.
Payment technologies allow merchants to display a set of predetermined tip amounts, for example, buttons for 15%, 20%, and 30%, along with a “no tip” or “custom tip” button. That setting makes it easier for us to choose a generous tip, rather than a smaller tip or no tip at all.
Many studies document this type of behavior. Ted Selker, a product design veteran who has worked at IBM, Xerox PARC and elsewhere, led previous research on encouraging people to register to vote. He found they were more likely to register if that option was pre-selected when they filled out applications for driver’s licenses and address changes. In other words, people were much more likely to opt out than to participate.
A Square spokeswoman said the company’s payment technology doesn’t allow merchants to pre-select a tip amount (except when tips are added automatically for large groups at a restaurant, an industry standard). But in my experience, some of the Square imitators allow merchants to do it.
A larger problem remains: When businesses that don’t normally receive tips use technology to present a tip screen, they require the consumer to opt out.
“It’s coercion,” Selker said.
On the plus side, the tip screens are not considered misleading, said Harry Brignull, a user experience consultant in Britain, because the “custom tip” and “no tip” buttons are about the same size as the tip buttons. . If opt-out buttons were extremely difficult to find, this would be an abusive practice known as “dark patterns.”
Still, if people feel unfair pressure to tip in situations where gratuity is unnecessary, government agencies like the Federal Trade Commission should look at that concern through a regulatory lens, Brignull said.
The FTC did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Treat tips the same way you treat technology.
I recommend approaching tipping the same way you might approach technology: be careful with defaults and decide when it’s okay to opt out.
In a previous column, I went over the default settings that I and other tech writers always change on our devices and social media accounts to minimize the data we share with tech companies. The moral of the story was that we can exercise some control over our personal information, we just have to know where to look and do some extra work.
The same principle can be applied to tips in the digital age. When a business asks for a tip, that technology is nothing more than emotionless software that displays numbers. You, too, can be neutral and objective when deciding whether to tip, and if so, how much.
“They are targeting the transaction when the point of the tip is to personalize it,” Selker said. “Your mindset should be is this really what you want to do?”
The best way to avoid feeling controlled by a screen, he added, is to tip cash whenever a gratuity is deemed necessary.
If you’re not happy with how a merchant uses tipping technology, you can also boycott it (although this might not be practical now that so many businesses use this technology). That’s not much different from the action of people who deactivated their Facebook accounts when they felt their privacy was violated.
Even design experts are sometimes surprised by defaults on tip screens. MIT’s Mr. Hu said he had recently been presented with tip options of $1, $3 and $5 after a $10 Uber ride. He chose the middle button, $3, before realizing that he would normally tip the driver 20 percent, or $2.
“They are psychological mind games,” he said.
