Project detail
Sweetee Cakes Co.
Sweetee Cakes Co. is a service-based custom cake business operating primarily through Instagram and word-of-mouth. The lack of a structured digital ordering system created operational inefficiencies, inconsistent customer experiences, and reduced perceived professionalism. The opportunity was not simply to design a website — it was to design a system that improved trust, reduced uncertainty, and standardized intake operations.
My Role
I served as the UX/UI designer and front-end implementer, responsible for both strategic direction and visual execution.
My responsibilities included:
Defining site architecture and user flows
Designing the custom cake inquiry system
Establishing visual identity and interface standards
Translating designs into responsive layouts
Aligning user needs with operational constraints
THE PROBLEM
Sweetee Cakes Co. operated primarily through Instagram and text-based communication. While the product quality was high, the ordering process lacked structure and scalability.
This created friction across multiple dimensions:
Operational inefficiency — Manual clarification increased time per orde
Information gaps — Inquiries often arrived incomplete
Brand perception mismatch — Visual quality exceeded digital presentation
Process ambiguity — Customers lacked clarity on next steps
As order volume increased, communication overhead grew proportionally, limiting scalability.
Unstructured intake created both customer hesitation and operational inefficiency.
UNDERSTANDING THE USER
To ground the redesign in real behavioral patterns, I created a composite persona based on intake conversations, ordering patterns, and friction points observed in the existing DM workflow.
The primary user is not browsing casually — she is planning a milestone event with high emotional stakes.
This persona clarified that the core issue was not feature depth, but predictability, response clarity, and visual trust.
Constraints & Tradeoffs
This redesign was shaped by real-world limitations. The business operated without a CRM or automation tools, requiring intake to be lightweight and manageable through Formspree. There was no analytics baseline, so friction points were identified through intake pattern review and behavioral observation.
Given limited operational bandwidth, I prioritized structured intake and confirmation clarity over complex e-commerce functionality. The solution focuses on reducing ambiguity while remaining sustainable for a small business to maintain.
Outcomes & Impact
Deployment & Stability
The website was deployed on Netlify and monitored using built-in observability tools to ensure uptime and request stability.
Week 1: 5,900+ requests with <1% error rate. Observability logs confirmed stable asset delivery and proper handling of common bot traffic and invalid endpoint requests.
This deployment validated that the intake system functioned reliably under real-world traffic conditions.
Reflection & Next Steps
This project reinforced that trust in service-based businesses is built through structure, not visual decoration.
The most impactful shift was not aesthetic refinement, but the formalization of intake into a predictable, confidence-driven workflow. Designing within real-world constraints required prioritizing sustainability over feature expansion.
If extended further, I would explore deeper system integration, including deposit-based checkout, CRM automation for order tracking, and structured analytics to measure form completion and response latency.
Long-term, the opportunity is to evolve the site from a structured intake tool into a fully integrated service platform.
This project strengthened my approach to UX as system design — aligning emotional reassurance with operational clarity.
