For many Canadians, picking up your morning coffee now comes with the swivel of an iPad and a list of tip options that can start at 18 or 20 per cent — but perhaps no option to not tip at all.
One expert says that approach to design — and those preset amounts — can be designed to play on a customer’s desire to appear generous, and nudge them into tipping more.
“People will wait in line, they know they’re being pressured, there’s like 20 people waiting behind them,” said Olivier St-Cyr, an associate professor at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, who studies user-experience design.
“You don’t want to look cheap and you don’t want to also take like six or seven extra steps in order to customize the tipping amount,” he told The Current’s Matt Galloway.
“So you just go with one of the pre-selected options.”