Tipping Guide – Your go-to guide for tipping: share experiences and tip smarter

Our client comes to us with a prospective startup focused on bringing clarity and confidence to tipping culture in the United States. The tipping process can often feel inconsistent or unclear. Service workers can find it hard to communicate expectations, and customers can be confused about when and how much to tip.

To address this, the Tipping Guide comes with an idea of building an online community where users and businesses can share the tipping culture. Namely, share experiences, provide feedback, and access transparent insights about tipping norms across tip-based establishments. With a Yelp-style business directory, both consumers and businesses can register, create accounts, and share tipping data.

Overall, the Tipping Guide should combine community-driven reviews with easy-to-understand tipping insights, helping users make smarter choices. It should also help service providers to build stronger, more trusted connections with their customers. Once we clarified all project requirements and the client’s business goals, we got started.

• Community Engagement: Motivating users to actively share tipping experiences,  reviews, and speak up about common tipping issues. 
• Content Moderation: Managing reviews and comments to keep discussions relevant and respectful for everyone.
• Differentiation: Clearly positioning Tipping Guide as a unique resource focused on tipping transparency and as a platform where you can find vital tipping facts.

➊ Discovery phase   

➋ Design   

➌ Website development   

➍ QA testing

Building a platform around tipping culture with the mentioned set of challenges, we tackled them head-on with practical solutions that kept both users and businesses in mind. We combined our expertise with the client’s vision, discussing feasible changes, and ultimately built a site that fulfilled their initial expectations. Specifically:

• Keeping information accurate

Since a reliable business directory is the backbone of Tipping Guide, we integrated the Google Places API to pull in verified business data. It gave us a good starting point and helped us avoid duplicate entries or outdated information.

• Encouraging community engagement

We prioritize making the user experience simple and smooth. Where they can easily create accounts, leave reviews, and share tipping experiences. A sleek and intuitive interface lowered the barrier to participation and helped grow an active community.

• Ensuring content quality

Open reviews can sometimes drift off-topic, so we built in moderation tools and approval flows for user-submitted businesses. This way, discussions stay constructive and focused on tipping practices.

• Preparing for monetization

Even though monetization isn’t the immediate goal, we designed the platform with future ad placements and business profile upgrades in mind. These options can be activated once the community reaches scale.

• Standing out from other review platforms

To differentiate from Yelp or Google Reviews, we put tipping insights at the center. Articles, data averages, and user-shared experiences highlight tipping practices directly. Something no other review app focuses on.

As a result, the site delivers important features designed to meet users’ needs: the ability to learn more about tipping culture, about when or how much to tip across services, and to share experiences with the online community to raise awareness about tipping culture in the USA.

• Tip calculator to accurately evaluate tips based on real data from U.S. customers and industry workers, ensuring fair and informed tipping practices.
• A tipping statistics dashboard that collects and displays comprehensive statistics on tipping across various services.
• Possibility to create posts and share users’ personal experiences with tipping and service fees across different venues such as hotels, restaurants, beauty salons, and more.
• Direct communication between users, allowing them to discuss and exchange opinions on tipping culture and related topics.

The result of our collaboration was a thoroughly designed web platform that conveys a major client’s mission to spread awareness about the American tipping culture and empower Americans to influence tipping practices. Today, the site actively brings together a community where people share their tipping experiences and motivate others to join this culture. The platform lets you figure out how much to tip for different services, based on real data from employees and customers.

We strongly believe that the platform will reshape people’s view of tipping, highlight its importance, and make it a natural, hassle-free habit instead of a challenging decision.