Tipping. It's a cultural norm that varies wildly depending on where you live. For instance, over in Japan, adding 10% extra to any bill is met with confusion and a concerned member of staff rushing out of the door to hand you back your change. However, do the same in the USA and you'll get a very different response - here, 20% is the default.
In the UK we fall somewhere between the two, where a 10% tip is considered socially normal.
Tipping is not what it was
But how does this all transfer over to the gig economy, a relatively new phenomenon where delivery riders scoot all around town to bring meals from restaurant kitchens direct to your door?
In the absence of in-house staff diligently taking down your order and waiting on your every whim, it is the rider that carries more of the weight when it comes to service.
But the jury's out on exactly how much to tip, or what these delivery services should be nudging us towards, especially when we haven't had a pre-existing norm around tipping other delivery drivers in the past to guide us (DHL, Hermes etc).
However, a recent study of 392 people (Duhaime et al., 2019) reveals a preference for tipping gig economy workers less than for equivalent full-time staff.
Nevertheless, one of the main players here in the UK is Deliveroo. Given this disparity, let's take a look at how they've behaviourally designed their in-app tipping system, contrasting it with one of their main competitors, Uber Eats.
Deliveroo's tipping system
Pre-delivery
At checkout, customers are presented with a prompt to add a rider tip, prior to payment.
Here, we can see a few things. First, tips aren't added by default, leaving it up to the customer to consider whether they wish to or not. This implies that tipping in this context isn't socially normative. There are no messages to suggest otherwise.
However, alongside the Tip Rider prompt is a face, which is defaulted to a small smile. Research around the concept of Reciprocity shows that we're hardwired to return kind gestures. Seeing this small smile first may trigger a desire to show some extra appreciation to the rider.
Tapping the + on the rider tip increments it by £1 amounts. More on this later, but there are two Feedback Loops that result.
The first is that the face changes from a small smile to a larger smile, acting as a socially-normative reciprocal feedback loop. Tap again, add an extra £1 and the larger smile turns to a full-on grin.
Secondarily, stars burst out from the + button to reward the user.
Looking at this all together, we can see that Reciprocity and Feedback Loops are used together to motivate tip-giving, though the Default is set to zero.
The £1 increments lean in to both our preference for Round-Pricing and for certainty.
The problems with pre-delivery tipping
A problem with all of this is that asking a customer to tip something they've yet to receive feels risky and unfamiliar compared with what they're used to in restaurants. You would never tip the chef when you enter the establishment before eating, for example.
A second problem is the phenomenon of tip-baiting, whereby large pre-delivery tips are promised to riders only to be revoked within an hour after delivery. This appears to be an issue particularly with Uber Eats and the design of its tipping system.
Third, from a rider motivation perspective, we know from research that delivery times are slower when tips are paid up-front than when they're given upon delivery (Study 3 - Duhaime et al., 2019), suggesting that pre-order tips act as a disincentive to riders (See Present Bias and Goal-Gradient Effect).
Given these three points, post-delivery tips are an important consideration too.
Post-delivery
Here, given that a) all the food has b) arrived unscathed within c) a specified timeframe, tipping feels most intuitive and least risky for customers. This is despite the fact that the app experience has essentially served its purpose: "Food is here. I am hungry. Time to eat."
Given this, Deliveroo now offers a different tipping experience, more akin to a restaurant.
Upon successful delivery, a call to action to tip is shown. Tapping it gives the customer two choices: a set of incremental, percentage-based tips, and another to define your own amount.
In this context, with food now delivered, there is lower customer risk associated with percentage-based tips, which on average are likely to be far higher than the £1-2 anchors in pre-delivery.
Compare this with Uber Eats here in the UK, where customers are only presented with percentage-based tips rather than comfortable round amounts, and only pre-delivery. The customer will be much more unwilling to tip (using a system that they've become familiar with in restaurants) *after* the food has arrived, not before.
Concluding thoughts
With the addition of a new third-party into the modern dining experience, in the shape of the rider, there is now some confusion about the weighting of importance this party should be given.
How best should they be compensated? When? How does this change from one culture to another? Certainly in the US, there is a greater expectation around tips for riders. To what extent is it the responsibility of the app to surface this information? What normative duty of care should they provide for riders?
Needless to say that even now, this is still an emerging space - not just from a technological angle, but from a behavioural and anthropological one too. Evolving algorithms, conflicting norms and varying cultural context all combine to make the behavioural design of gig economy services a fascinating sector to watch going forward.
Special
Pricing
Tipping in the age of convenience
How Deliveroo uses positive, reciprocal feedback and round pricing to increase generosity.
Tipping. It's a cultural norm that varies wildly depending on where you live. For instance, over in Japan, adding 10% extra to any bill is met with confusion and a concerned member of staff rushing out of the door to hand you back your change. However, do the same in the USA and you'll get a very different response - here, 20% is the default.
In the UK we fall somewhere between the two, where a 10% tip is considered socially normal.
Tipping is not what it was
But how does this all transfer over to the gig economy, a relatively new phenomenon where delivery riders scoot all around town to bring meals from restaurant kitchens direct to your door?
In the absence of in-house staff diligently taking down your order and waiting on your every whim, it is the rider that carries more of the weight when it comes to service.
But the jury's out on exactly how much to tip, or what these delivery services should be nudging us towards, especially when we haven't had a pre-existing norm around tipping other delivery drivers in the past to guide us (DHL, Hermes etc).
However, a recent study of 392 people (Duhaime et al., 2019) reveals a preference for tipping gig economy workers less than for equivalent full-time staff.
Nevertheless, one of the main players here in the UK is Deliveroo. Given this disparity, let's take a look at how they've behaviourally designed their in-app tipping system, contrasting it with one of their main competitors, Uber Eats.
Deliveroo's tipping system
Pre-delivery
At checkout, customers are presented with a prompt to add a rider tip, prior to payment.
Here, we can see a few things. First, tips aren't added by default, leaving it up to the customer to consider whether they wish to or not. This implies that tipping in this context isn't socially normative. There are no messages to suggest otherwise.
However, alongside the Tip Rider prompt is a face, which is defaulted to a small smile. Research around the concept of Reciprocity shows that we're hardwired to return kind gestures. Seeing this small smile first may trigger a desire to show some extra appreciation to the rider.
Tapping the + on the rider tip increments it by £1 amounts. More on this later, but there are two Feedback Loops that result.
The first is that the face changes from a small smile to a larger smile, acting as a socially-normative reciprocal feedback loop. Tap again, add an extra £1 and the larger smile turns to a full-on grin.
Secondarily, stars burst out from the + button to reward the user.
Looking at this all together, we can see that Reciprocity and Feedback Loops are used together to motivate tip-giving, though the Default is set to zero.
The £1 increments lean in to both our preference for Round-Pricing and for certainty.
The problems with pre-delivery tipping
A problem with all of this is that asking a customer to tip something they've yet to receive feels risky and unfamiliar compared with what they're used to in restaurants. You would never tip the chef when you enter the establishment before eating, for example.
A second problem is the phenomenon of tip-baiting, whereby large pre-delivery tips are promised to riders only to be revoked within an hour after delivery. This appears to be an issue particularly with Uber Eats and the design of its tipping system.
Third, from a rider motivation perspective, we know from research that delivery times are slower when tips are paid up-front than when they're given upon delivery (Study 3 - Duhaime et al., 2019), suggesting that pre-order tips act as a disincentive to riders (See Present Bias and Goal-Gradient Effect).
Given these three points, post-delivery tips are an important consideration too.
Post-delivery
Here, given that a) all the food has b) arrived unscathed within c) a specified timeframe, tipping feels most intuitive and least risky for customers. This is despite the fact that the app experience has essentially served its purpose: "Food is here. I am hungry. Time to eat."
Given this, Deliveroo now offers a different tipping experience, more akin to a restaurant.
Upon successful delivery, a call to action to tip is shown. Tapping it gives the customer two choices: a set of incremental, percentage-based tips, and another to define your own amount.
In this context, with food now delivered, there is lower customer risk associated with percentage-based tips, which on average are likely to be far higher than the £1-2 anchors in pre-delivery.
Compare this with Uber Eats here in the UK, where customers are only presented with percentage-based tips rather than comfortable round amounts, and only pre-delivery. The customer will be much more unwilling to tip (using a system that they've become familiar with in restaurants) *after* the food has arrived, not before.
Concluding thoughts
With the addition of a new third-party into the modern dining experience, in the shape of the rider, there is now some confusion about the weighting of importance this party should be given.
How best should they be compensated? When? How does this change from one culture to another? Certainly in the US, there is a greater expectation around tips for riders. To what extent is it the responsibility of the app to surface this information? What normative duty of care should they provide for riders?
Needless to say that even now, this is still an emerging space - not just from a technological angle, but from a behavioural and anthropological one too. Evolving algorithms, conflicting norms and varying cultural context all combine to make the behavioural design of gig economy services a fascinating sector to watch going forward.
What’s a Rich Text element?
The rich text element allows y
ou to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.
Static and dynamic content editing
A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!
How to customize formatting for each rich text
Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.
Special
Pricing
Tipping in the age of convenience
How Deliveroo uses positive, reciprocal feedback and round pricing to increase generosity.
Tipping. It's a cultural norm that varies wildly depending on where you live. For instance, over in Japan, adding 10% extra to any bill is met with confusion and a concerned member of staff rushing out of the door to hand you back your change. However, do the same in the USA and you'll get a very different response - here, 20% is the default.
In the UK we fall somewhere between the two, where a 10% tip is considered socially normal.
Tipping is not what it was
But how does this all transfer over to the gig economy, a relatively new phenomenon where delivery riders scoot all around town to bring meals from restaurant kitchens direct to your door?
In the absence of in-house staff diligently taking down your order and waiting on your every whim, it is the rider that carries more of the weight when it comes to service.
But the jury's out on exactly how much to tip, or what these delivery services should be nudging us towards, especially when we haven't had a pre-existing norm around tipping other delivery drivers in the past to guide us (DHL, Hermes etc).
However, a recent study of 392 people (Duhaime et al., 2019) reveals a preference for tipping gig economy workers less than for equivalent full-time staff.
Nevertheless, one of the main players here in the UK is Deliveroo. Given this disparity, let's take a look at how they've behaviourally designed their in-app tipping system, contrasting it with one of their main competitors, Uber Eats.
Deliveroo's tipping system
Pre-delivery
At checkout, customers are presented with a prompt to add a rider tip, prior to payment.
Here, we can see a few things. First, tips aren't added by default, leaving it up to the customer to consider whether they wish to or not. This implies that tipping in this context isn't socially normative. There are no messages to suggest otherwise.
However, alongside the Tip Rider prompt is a face, which is defaulted to a small smile. Research around the concept of Reciprocity shows that we're hardwired to return kind gestures. Seeing this small smile first may trigger a desire to show some extra appreciation to the rider.
Tapping the + on the rider tip increments it by £1 amounts. More on this later, but there are two Feedback Loops that result.
The first is that the face changes from a small smile to a larger smile, acting as a socially-normative reciprocal feedback loop. Tap again, add an extra £1 and the larger smile turns to a full-on grin.
Secondarily, stars burst out from the + button to reward the user.
Looking at this all together, we can see that Reciprocity and Feedback Loops are used together to motivate tip-giving, though the Default is set to zero.
The £1 increments lean in to both our preference for Round-Pricing and for certainty.
The problems with pre-delivery tipping
A problem with all of this is that asking a customer to tip something they've yet to receive feels risky and unfamiliar compared with what they're used to in restaurants. You would never tip the chef when you enter the establishment before eating, for example.
A second problem is the phenomenon of tip-baiting, whereby large pre-delivery tips are promised to riders only to be revoked within an hour after delivery. This appears to be an issue particularly with Uber Eats and the design of its tipping system.
Third, from a rider motivation perspective, we know from research that delivery times are slower when tips are paid up-front than when they're given upon delivery (Study 3 - Duhaime et al., 2019), suggesting that pre-order tips act as a disincentive to riders (See Present Bias and Goal-Gradient Effect).
Given these three points, post-delivery tips are an important consideration too.
Post-delivery
Here, given that a) all the food has b) arrived unscathed within c) a specified timeframe, tipping feels most intuitive and least risky for customers. This is despite the fact that the app experience has essentially served its purpose: "Food is here. I am hungry. Time to eat."
Given this, Deliveroo now offers a different tipping experience, more akin to a restaurant.
Upon successful delivery, a call to action to tip is shown. Tapping it gives the customer two choices: a set of incremental, percentage-based tips, and another to define your own amount.
In this context, with food now delivered, there is lower customer risk associated with percentage-based tips, which on average are likely to be far higher than the £1-2 anchors in pre-delivery.
Compare this with Uber Eats here in the UK, where customers are only presented with percentage-based tips rather than comfortable round amounts, and only pre-delivery. The customer will be much more unwilling to tip (using a system that they've become familiar with in restaurants) *after* the food has arrived, not before.
Concluding thoughts
With the addition of a new third-party into the modern dining experience, in the shape of the rider, there is now some confusion about the weighting of importance this party should be given.
How best should they be compensated? When? How does this change from one culture to another? Certainly in the US, there is a greater expectation around tips for riders. To what extent is it the responsibility of the app to surface this information? What normative duty of care should they provide for riders?
Needless to say that even now, this is still an emerging space - not just from a technological angle, but from a behavioural and anthropological one too. Evolving algorithms, conflicting norms and varying cultural context all combine to make the behavioural design of gig economy services a fascinating sector to watch going forward.
What’s a Rich Text element?
The rich text element allows y
ou to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.
Static and dynamic content editing
A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!
How to customize formatting for each rich text
Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.
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