---
title: "Tipping without guilt"
author: Dan Birman
url: https://dbirman.com/uber
updated: 2026-11-09
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 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

tipped to drivers in the first year, per Uber

90%+

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

## What we tested

I surveyed drivers who drove for both Uber and Lyft, and ran several dozen in-person interviews and user tests. The question was how to make tipping reward good drivers without putting social pressure on riders. 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]

## 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.

[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).