---
title: "Tipping without guilt"
author: Dan Birman
url: https://dbirman.com/uber
updated: 2026-11-10
summary: "I led design for rating and tipping at Uber, built around one question: how do you reward good drivers without guilting riders?"
---

# Tipping without guilt

Product Design Lead · 3 min

I led design for rating and tipping at Uber, built around one question: how do you reward good drivers without guilting riders? Drivers who also drove for Lyft mentioned tips more often in their feedback, and some had put out their own tip jars. We tested asking for a tip first and showing it like a bill, and shipped the opposite: rate the trip first, and tipping appears with five stars, so reward follows good service. Riders tipped drivers $600M (published figure) in the first year.

Role
:   Product Design Lead

Team
:   11 designers (5 product, 3 visual, 2 motion, 1 brand), 6 engineers, 2 data scientists, a researcher and a PM

Timeline
:   2016 to 2017, launched June 2017

Scope
:   Rider rating and tipping

$600M (published figure)

tipped to drivers in the first year, per Uber

90%+

adoption of the driver navigation redesign I co-led, within six months

## Principles

- Tips should reward the best drivers for specific things they did well.
- Riders shouldn’t feel guilty. Tipping is optional, and it should leave them feeling good.
- Tipping on Uber should beat tipping anywhere else and still feel like Uber.

## What we tested

I surveyed drivers who drove for both Uber and Lyft, and ran several dozen in-person interviews and user tests. We tested four versions before the one that shipped.

Killed: **Tip first.** The wrong order. Riders wanted to judge the trip before deciding whether to tip.

Killed: **Rate or tip, either first.** Riders froze: tip first, rate first, or both?

Killed: **Rate first, with social proof.** Showing that much about the driver was distracting.

Killed: **Rate first, on the map.** The map added nothing to the trip, and it loaded badly in some international markets.

Shipped: **Rate first, tip at five stars.** The rider judges the trip, and a five-star rating opens a compliment and a tip. Anything less asks what went wrong instead.

[Image: Three versions we tested and dropped: tip first, the driver’s profile as social proof, and the rating on a map]

In the shipped flow, a rating under five stars also offers a way to reach support. Tip payments can fail, so the flow shows an error and lets the rider try again. The rating card loads before the map, separate from the home feed, so it shows up reliably.

## Try it

A rebuild of the rate-then-tip flow. Give five stars to see the tip options, or fewer to see what happens instead. You can also make the payment fail.

[Interactive demo. Switch to the human view to try it.]

A reconstruction, not Uber’s code. The driver and amounts are made up.

The short version. [Ruli](https://dbirman.com/ruli) is the case study I go deep on; for this one, [ask me](mailto:hi@dbirman.com?subject=Tipping%20without%20guilt).