Nextipz
Tipping in the UAE is still mostly cash or awkward card workarounds. Nextipz turns a table tent or badge QR code into a tip in under 15 seconds, with the payout landing directly with the staff member who earned it.
The challenge
Hospitality staff in UAE restaurants, cafés and hotels mostly rely on cash tips or ad-hoc transfers, which are easy to forget, awkward to request, and leave no record for the staff member or the venue.
Any digital tipping flow has to work for a guest who has never used the product before, on their own phone, usually one-handed, often mid-meal — so the entire path from scanning a code to a completed tip has to ask for almost nothing and explain itself instantly.
Approach
I designed the flow backwards from the guest's moment of intent: they've decided to tip, and every screen between that decision and payment confirmation is a chance to lose them. That meant minimising input fields, pre-set tip amounts over free-text entry by default, and a payment step that reuses familiar local gateway UI patterns rather than inventing new ones.
On the staff side, I designed a lightweight dashboard view so individual staff or venue managers can see tips received without needing a full back-office system — keeping the product narrow and shippable rather than trying to be a full POS replacement.
What I built
A QR-first mobile flow: scan a code at the table, pick or enter a tip amount, pay through a local gateway, done.
- Guest flow: scan → amount → pay → confirmation, no account creation required
- Staff-facing view of tips received, scoped to the individual or the venue
- Payment integration designed around local UAE payment gateways for familiar, trusted checkout UI
Where this stands
Nextipz is a Figma prototype, not a tested or shipped product yet. No usability testing has been run on it — the numbers below are design targets I built the flow around, not measured results, and I want to be upfront about that distinction.
The prototype is the reference design for a planned build-out. The next real step, before any of this is a claim rather than a target, is five or so moderated usability sessions with the actual flow. If you're a restaurant group or hotel operator interested in piloting it, that's a conversation worth having.