Explorex · Elite

We gave customers bigger discounts.Revenue went up 35%.

Explorex helped restaurants process the transaction. We saw an opportunity beyond it: give customers a reason to come back.

Elite home screen, showing Live Table Status, a search bar and featured restaurants with active offers

Merchant revenue lift: 35%

From the tiered discount engine, live in Elite and Bridge together.

Elite downloads: 44K+

On a consumer app that did not exist before this project.

Android rating: 4★

Held across every partner restaurant running the app.

01 · The gap

The restaurant knew what you ordered.Then you disappeared.

QR ordering made the transaction easier. But after payment, the relationship ended.

First screen after a QR code scan, offering a choice between the Elite app and continuing on web — Scan / entryThe QR scan starts the transaction. Nothing here starts a relationship.

Digital Dine-in food menu, with a third party advertisement banner inside the ordering flow — Menu / browseA guest browses a menu that has never seen them before, and never will again.

Digital Dine-in cart, showing a category accordion and a sticky order total — Order / checkoutA working cart and a sticky total. No thread back to this guest afterward.

Printed style receipt, with a discount already applied but no explanation shown — The billA discount already applied, no visible reason why, on a receipt with no branding.

The flow, as it existed

Scan

Browse

Order

Call waiter

Pay

What if payment wasn't the end?

02 · The product bet

We turned the transactioninto a reason to return.

Elite connected the restaurant visit to rewards, giving customers a reason to come back and giving restaurants a way to build a longer-term relationship.

OrderA restaurant page where the reward is visible before a menu is even opened.

Pay bill screen, showing the payable amount with a wow you are getting 20 percent discount message — EarnOriginal and Elite price shown together, the reward named in plain language.

Notifications screen, showing order and table updates grouped clearly — Unlock / returnA tier update the next day. The reason to open Elite again.

The connected loop

Discover

Order

Earn

Unlock

Return

03 · The decision

The discount wasn't the reward.The next purchase was.

A flat discount rewards the transaction that's already happening. We wanted the reward to influence what the customer did next.

Restaurant-side input

Average order value → optimised reward thresholds.

Customer-side input

Dining history and frequency → personalised reward value.

The tiers weren't fixed. They were tuned to each restaurant's average order value, and adapted to each customer's dining behaviour across Explorex restaurants.

Up to ₹2,000

10% reward

Above ₹2,000

15% reward

Above ₹4,000

20% reward

Where the number comes from

Restaurant AOV

Personalised threshold

Reward value

Make the next threshold visible. Make the next purchase feel worth it.

Pay bill screen, amount entered, with the twenty percent tier now unlocked live — The reward interactionCurrent spend, the next threshold and the reward, all visible before Apply Offer is even tapped.

04 · Business mechanism

A reward only worksif the restaurant makes money too.

Customer

Spend more

Unlock a better reward. Have a reason to return.

Restaurant

Higher basket

Higher revenue. A repeat customer, not a one-off discount.

The challenge was to increase customer value without turning the reward into a margin giveaway.

05 · A pain point, fixed with data

The waiter who disappeared.And the score that replaced guesswork.

The worst part of a busy night out isn't the wait. It's not knowing if anyone is coming.

Feature 01

Table service, on request

Requesting service already existed in the ordering flow. Almost nobody used it, because almost nobody could find it. We rebuilt the entry point around the requests guests actually made most, water, cutlery, the bill, named to the waiter serving the table.

Table Service Request screen, showing the assigned waiter's name and four common request buttons

Experience Score explainer screen, showing a score of 4 out of 5 with what it is and why it matters

Feature 02

A transparent score, not a star rating

A star rating is one number with no explanation. Elite's Experience Score is built from satisfaction rate, amenities and footfall instead, shown to a guest before asking them to trust it, so the tiering and table status decisions elsewhere in the app feel earned, not arbitrary.

06 · Research, Bangalore

Time on the floor,not just in Figma.

We shadowed restaurant staff and mapped how orders, tables and rewards actually moved across Bangalore restaurants.
Three things that shaped Elite.

Four friends leaning over one phone at a table, checking an order together

01 · Where the phone actually goes. Orders are rarely solo. The phone that matters is whichever one is in someone's hand, so a shared, glanceable bill mattered more than a polished solo checkout.

A chef plating dim sum with chopsticks at a bar counter, focused entirely on the dish

02 · The kitchen never saw the guest. Reward and discount context lived entirely on the guest's phone, so recognition depended on staff memory, not the system.

A waiter in a shirt and tie carrying a tray of drinks and fruit across a sunlit dining room

03 · Staff already read the room. Experienced floor staff were reading a room's rush by eye. Live Table Status had to formalise that instinct, not invent a new behaviour.

07 · One platform, tiered partners

Every partner restaurant.One platform, three tiers.

Signature, Classic and Regular. The tier shapes what a guest sees first.

Signature Partner

The tier isn't cosmetic

Three things sit above the fold on a Signature Partner's page, the context a guest needs before opening a menu.

Guests served
Experience score
A spotlight tag

The reward engine runs on the same platform as ordering and payment, so tiering is a partnerships decision, not a separate system. Our job was making that tier legible in three seconds, not deciding who qualifies for it.

08 · Live Table Status

Know before you go.Not after you arrive.

Two ways in: browse every nearby restaurant's fill level, or check one restaurant directly against your party size.

Live Table Status list, showing nearby restaurants with running hot, fast filling and available tags — From the home screenEvery restaurant nearby, filtered by party size, sorted by discount or distance.

Live Table Status seats picker, marked as an Elite exclusive feature — Elite exclusiveA limited number of free checks for non-members, enough to feel the value first.

Table availability list for one restaurant, broken down by party size — From one restaurantChecked against the table size a guest actually needs, not a generic figure.

This is the feature guests most associate with joining Elite. It answers the one question a reward never could: is tonight even worth going.

09 · Beyond the diner

The same problem,seen from the floor.

Elite's reward only holds up if a waiter accepts an order in seconds, not minutes. Bridge is where that happens.

Explorex Bridge desktop dashboard, showing an Action Centre, a live tables view and other order channels including Zomato and Swiggy

Bridge mPOS mobile screen, showing the same live orders and table view for a waiter on the floor

Bridge and mPOS run the same Action Centre logic, on the host desktop and in a waiter's pocket alike. Table service requests, unpaid bills and new orders all land in one ranked queue. The reward a guest sees on their phone only holds up if the floor side keeps pace with it.

The transaction becamea growth loop.

Discover

Order

Reward

Return

Spend more

↺

Merchant revenue lift: 35%

Elite downloads: 44K+

Android rating: 4★

I stopped designing the transaction and started designing what happened after it.

Start a conversation Next case study: Pluto Energy