We wanted to bake, but not only bake
A friend and I created a tiny baking business in Venezuela for a while in 2015 called Ponque Mama Social Club. It was intended as a side hustle but we soon found ourselves baking all day which left us little time to work on the projects we really wanted to do: art, design and architecture. We wanted to bake, but not only bake.
The Problem. Baking Hard for the Money.
This is my first UI/UX project!
My friend and I have always enjoyed baking and we took a lot of pride on running the whole show by ourselves: brand design, marketing, ingredient shopping, baking and even delivering. As more people discovered us, we found ourselves dedicating more and more time to what was suppose to be a side project. After baking non-stop for a while we took a step back to look at our schedule:
We discovered it was the variety of cake flavors and not the number of cakes that kept us working late. We had to juggle making different cake batters with different baking times, decoration and delivery schedules.
The Solution. Uni-cake a Day.
We needed to be more efficient with our time. We decided to limit our hours by baking one flavor per day and adjusting our baking days depending on how busy we were. Our week started looking more like this:
This arrangement gave us defined blocks of time to dedicate to our design and architecture projects as well as a clear picture of how our week would look like.
As a result, our business became more profitable because we could bake more cakes in less time. We spent less on ingredients because we could buy them in bulk. It also gave us the freedom to pick which days we’d bake depending on how busy we were with our other projects.
For the app, we wanted to easily inform our customers when we were open and which cake flavor we were offering that day.
We also wanted to support online payments. We didn't have a point of sale system, and cash was a scarce resource in Venezuela back then. That's why online payment was a must.
This was our admin app for tracking and fulfilling orders.
Takeaways. Looking Back.
Sadly, we never got to see this project get developed, and I moved from Venezuela shortly after
I was in charge of creating - what i now know are called - the user journey, wireframes and mockups. Although there are many things I would do differently today (make fonts bigger, make buttons seem clickable, show error states, to name a few) i’m very proud of how i was able to express on somewhat-functional screens the idea we had to boost our baking project.
