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CheeseBusiness: Designing a CMS for Custom Cake Configuration
Project Duration
3 week
Role
UX/UI Designer
Tools
Figma, Figjam
Introducing CheeseBusiness
Running a custom cake business felt exciting at first — customers could mix and match flavors, sizes, toppings, and special requests freely. But as CheeseBusiness grew, that flexibility started to create complexity behind the scenes.
What was once easy to manage became harder to structure and maintain.
This project focuses on solving that growth — by designing a CMS that keeps complexity organized instead of letting it accumulate.
Understanding the system behind cake customization
I didn’t begin this project with a specific problem in mind. Instead, I started by understanding how the customization system actually worked behind the scenes.
As I broke down flavors, sizes, toppings, pricing, and the relationships between them, it became clear that the challenge wasn't the number of options available—it was how those options interacted with one another. What seemed like a straightforward customization experience on the surface was supported by a growing system that became increasingly difficult to organize, maintain, and scale.
Who uses the system and how it’s used
I started by looking into the people who would interact with the system and how they would approach setting up and managing custom cakes in real situations.
To ground this understanding, I combined early user research with an analysis of existing workflows. This included speaking with people involved in managing customization processes and studying how similar systems are structured. The goal was to understand not just what users needed, but how they actually think when dealing with complex configurations.
“I need to update things quickly, but I’m always afraid something else might break.”
Pain Points
Workarounds
Hard to understand how options and rules are connected
Double-checking changes across multiple screens
Changes in one area can affect other configurations
Testing configurations repeatedly before publishing
Adding new custom elements requires extra support or workarounds
Avoiding changes unless necessary due to risk of breaking something
" I know what I want to add, but I can’t always do it myself inside the system "
Pain Points
Workarounds
Cannot add new custom shapes or visual elements independently
Requesting developers to manually implement new shapes
Existing structure is not flexible enough for new customization needs
Delaying updates until technical support is available
Requires external support for even small structural updates
Using existing shapes as substitutes even when they don’t fully match the requirement
The challenges of managing cake customization
As I explored the workflow in more detail, three core challenges became clear.
Too many options to keep track of
As more flavors, sizes, and toppings were added, it became hard to see how everything connected, making updates confusing and easy to get wrong.
Small changes take too much effort
Even a simple update, like adding a new flavor, required changes in multiple places across the system, making the process slow and repetitive.
Limited flexibility for new elements
Custom shapes or new elements couldn’t be added beyond the predefined options, making it difficult to expand the system
" How might we design a CMS that can manage complex product customization without breaking structure as it scales? "
Key insights
I didn’t begin this project with a specific problem in mind. Instead, I started by understanding how the customization system actually worked behind the scenes.
As I broke down flavors, sizes, toppings, pricing, and the relationships between them, it became clear that the challenge wasn't the number of options available—it was how those options interacted with one another. What seemed like a straightforward customization experience on the surface was supported by a growing system that became increasingly difficult to organize, maintain, and scale.