Gratuitous Design: Death Before Taxes?
Another post in the Gratuitous design series, this one on tax and its role in tipping.
We’ve seen reviews of other tip calculators where someone will give the app a bad review simply because it doesn’t offer tipping on the pre-tax value of the bill. Despite knowing that some vocal people want tipping based on the pre-tax value, we left this option out of Gratuitous. Why’d we do this? Before we answer that, let’s examine the two ways tax can be taken into account.
Pre-Calculated
Some cities, countries, or establishments include the tip directly into the bill. So, that $108 bill might actually be $100 + $8 (8% tax rate). In this case, in order for Gratuitous to calculate the tip based on the pre-taxed bill of $100, we’d have to add a tax percentage rate field, allowing the user to enter in 8%.
Applied After
Other places may include the tip separately on the bill. So, the bill amount would be shown as $100 with $8 for the tax (based on our 8% tax rate). Depending on how explicit you want to be with the support of pre-tax tipping, Gratuitous could have a tax dollar amount field, allowing the user to enter in $8. Alternatively, you could eschew this extra field and the user could just simply enter the pre-tax amount in the existing bill field.
So, in order to correctly calculate the tip before tax, we’d have to add a tax rate percentage and possibly a tax amount field (depending on how taxes are included in the bill). Sure, we could be clever and combine these two fields into a single field that is toggled between either percentage and a fixed amount. Now, where should this single toggled field go? Wherever we place it, it would need to have some sort of an explanation to prevent user’s from being confused over this new field allowing user entry.
We really dislike extra clutter in the UI. We’re pretty vigilant about this considering the screen real estate is at a premium on the mobile platform. So, finding a good spot for this additional field (or two) would be challenging.
However, the primary reason why we didn’t include tipping based on the pre-tax value is that we’re confident the majority do not tip this way. Additionally, most tipping guides will recommend tipping on the post-tax amount for a variety of reasons (wait staff tip out after tax, expected norm, etc). As to not compromise the design for the majority who would never use this functionality, we made the decision to leave it out.
So, if you tip before taxes, the best we can offer you is to tap in your pre-taxed bill (assuming the check has the tax broken out). For those who tip on the full amount, be Gratuitous!
