Transforming cake ordering from stressful guessing to confident ordering with live preview.
Overview
Zippy's is Hawaii's largest local restaurant chain. Their custom cake form was costing them money and stressing out customers and staff.
We redesigned it to work for overwhelmed parents, busy bakers, and kūpuna who just want a cake to celebrate their 70th birthday.
My Role
Product Designer
Timeline
April - June 2025
(3 Months)
Team Structure
2 Designers
4 Software Engineers
1 Product Manager
Before
After
“I almost canceled my daughter’s party because I was so stressed about the cake. I had no idea if my order would go through.”
— Mom ordering for her 6 year old
The bakers process was very analog:
🍰 Orders were all faxed and printed to the bakery
📞 Bakers called every customer for visual confirmation
📖 Customers chose from 100+ decoration binder or emailed their own images
🚚 Bakers re-entered everything manually into a digital software used only for delivery scheduling.
Bakery Research
Fax with notes from the confirmation call + print out of delivery schedule
Bakery catalog of all the preset image printing
1. Logistics first (pickup location/time)
Users typically start an order knowing the date and occasion (Baby Emi 1st Birthday party). Having users fill in the logistics first allows them to build confidence with the easy decisions.
2. Size and flavor are easy decisions that feel safe
Our stakeholders said that the live preview feature "is too complex and expensive.” We used testing data to show that users were abandoning orders due to uncertainty. We calculated that the preview would save 50/hours per month by cutting out the confirmation phone call.
Personalization and creative decisions when users are invested
Saving personalization for the end, we built smart checks that guided users to upload images and appropriate text before moving to the next step. This allowed the platform to act as the buffer for blurry, low quality, or explicit content instead of the bakers.
Decorations! The fun creative decisions
We needed hundreds of cake preview images showing every possible combination of 4 sizes, 14+ flavors, decorations, and colors.
Traditional approach: Photoshoot nightmare, weeks of scheduling, and more cake than we could eat.
Our approach: AI assisted asset generation using Mid-journey and manual adjustments in Photoshop. AI didn’t replace design thinking, it accelerated asset production so we could focus on the hard UX problems.
Payment & confirmation only asks for commitment after confidence is built
The redesign builds the users trust at every step in the form by providing visual feedback for each choice they make. This actually gave customers the confidence to place bigger orders with more complex cakes because they trusted the product and the process.
increase in order completion
Results
reduction in clarification calls
saved by bakery per month
40%
98%
50 hrs.
Eliminated the 3-day uncertainty period for customers and enabled larger, more complex orders through increased customer confidence.
Building Design Influence in Business Environments
I learned that effective design advocacy requires translating user needs into business language. "Users need visual feedback" became "visual confirmation reduces operational overhead and increases order value."
AI is a tool, not a designer
It accelerated our asset pipeline but required heavy art direction and design thinking to work. The hard part wasn’t generating images. It was knowing which images to generate and how to get them.
Complex systems need guided complexity
Don’t hide the options! Sequence them so that users can build confidence with each choice.