🏢 Company Toast
📅 Duration 3 months in 2019
🙋🏻♂️ Role Designer (1 of 2)
📓 Responsibilities Research, UX, UI
In 2019, I helped design an automated tip pooling tool for restaurant managers. Toast wanted to reduce the time it takes for restaurants to run payroll so that restaurant owners and operators could spend more time on other tasks. Tips management is a large part of the payroll process. The goal was to reduce the time required by restaurants to manage tips by 3 hours per week.
Restaurants were telling us that one of the most time consuming parts of the payroll process was calculating and distributing tips across employees participating in tip pools or tip shares. Historically, through Toast Payroll, individuals managing tips would spend 5 hours per pay period on average managing tips. These individuals were either managers, payroll processors, or some other form of restaurant owner/operators. We learned through prior research that they were manually entering hours, sales, and tip amounts into a spreadsheet, applying their unique tip policy, exporting their custom file, and then importing that file into the Toast Payroll payroll module. It was a lot. Toast recognized an opportunity in that its platform already knows the values of all of the most common inputs into tip pooling policies, and it also processes payroll for these restaurants, so it would be a no-brainer to automatically transform the tip inputs into tip outputs and transmit them to payroll.
<aside> 💡 Tip pooling, or tip sharing, is the process by which tipped restaurant employees split tips amongst themselves.(e.g. Servers give 10% of beverage sales to bartenders)
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I worked on a team with one other designer, one PM, and five engineers. The other designer was a senior level designer while I was an associate, so he took charge of the high-level design strategy and mentored me throughout the project. We divided the design of the product into two key areas - policy configuration and tip reporting. I led the design of the policy configuration tool while the senior designer took point on the reporting side.
The senior designer and PM conducted generative research before I joined the team to uncover some key findings about the tip pooling problem. They learned a) Tip pooling rules are highly diverse across restaurants, b) employee transparency is important, and c) managing tip pools takes a lot of time. I then worked with them to conduct competitive research via secondary sources to corroborate the findings and develop a better perspective on how other market entrants were approaching the problem. The discovery research and competitive analysis made it clear that there should be two primary aspects of our tip pooling service, tip pool policy configuration and tip pool outputs reporting.
I led the design efforts of the tip pool policy configuration tool. Under guidance from my manager, we ran a team workshop in which participants (designers, engineers, and PMs) were encouraged to sketch 8 ideas in 8 minutes in order to generate a pool of ideas from which we could further evaluate. In the end, clear patterns emerged and we identified the most promising solutions to bring to usability testing.
Figure 1 A handful of sketches from our team "Crazy 8's" exercise - these influenced later prototypes