Independent Designer · Brand · Product · UX
Twenty-six years in commercial kitchens. Left the work in 2024. Design is what I built next — and the four projects on this site are the record of that work, shipped to real users, iterated against real use.
I spotted the opportunity, built the site, and ran the business — then watched real customers abandon the booking form and question the pricing page. Redesigned from what I actually saw, not a research panel. Season one: a handful of bookings. Season two: ~50, with a measured 12% booking lift and 20% better form completion.
First end-to-end UX project. I picked fintech because I wanted to learn the hardest domain. Personas, user flows, and design system are mine. The metrics in the original brief were class-project projections, not measured outcomes. Here's what I built — and what I'd do differently now.
Built three versions of the brand before this one stuck — each taught me something the last one got wrong. The fourth: brand, storefront, and a 238-page operations manual for a baking business I also run, kept anonymous by request. Still selling, still getting sharper.
Built from a decade running a cake business — smart intake, complexity-weighted pricing, dual internal-and-client quote views, a production grid that prioritizes by what actually matters. Still live, still getting rewritten wherever real orders reveal what the first version got wrong.
Twenty-six years in commercial kitchens. Left the work in 2024. Design is what I built next.
The four projects on this site are connected. Grace Mills is the operations system I wrote out of the kitchen — the manual no one handed me on day one. Confection is the booking app I needed for a quarter-century and never had. Sheffield Grave Care is a service business I built, ran, and am rebuilding from what I learned operating it. CreditWise is a class project, shown honestly with what it got wrong.
The work isn't a portfolio of unrelated client projects. It's one person's record of building things, watching them break, and rebuilding from truth. The Inverse Method came out of that — not from a design school.
Available for full-time opportunities and freelance projects.
or email directly: sloaneindigo@proton.me
Build. I spotted the opportunity, built the site, and ran the business — booking flow, pricing page, the whole first version, live and taking real customers.
Break. Then I watched what actually happened. Customers abandoned the booking form mid-fill. They re-read the pricing page and still emailed to ask what it actually cost. Not a research panel's opinion — the real thing, happening in real time, on my own business.
Rebuild. Redesigned from that truth: mobile-first, sage palette, compassionate language, pricing made transparent up front. The biggest wins came from removing things, not adding them — fewer fields, fewer pages, fewer unanswered questions.
Results. Season one: a handful of bookings. Season two, post-redesign: ~50. A 12% booking lift within 60 days of launch, 20% better form completion on the same seven fields, 20% lower bounce, 15% fewer pricing-related support emails, 4.6/5 customer satisfaction. All measured, none projected.
First end-to-end UX project. I picked fintech because I wanted to learn the hardest domain — financial anxiety is real, trust is everything, and the design has to stay out of the user's way. The personas (Alex, Priya, Jordan), user flows, design system, and screens are all mine. The metrics in the original class deliverable were projections, not measured outcomes. Honest growth marker.
Build. Designed and built from the inside — a decade running a cake business, encoded directly into the product: smart intake with client history, complexity-weighted pricing, dual internal-and-client quote views, a production grid that prioritizes by what actually matters, not just size.
Break & Rebuild — in progress. Still live, still being used, still getting rewritten wherever real orders reveal what the first version got wrong. Not finished. That's the point — nothing on this site ships once and sits still.
Build. Built the first version of the brand. Then the second. Then the third — each one real, live, and actually selling.
Break. None of them stuck. Each version taught me something the last one got wrong — the wrong tone, the wrong palette, a promise to the buyer that didn't match what was actually being sold.
Rebuild. The fourth version, live now: the brand, the storefront, and a 238-page operations manual for a baking business I also run — kept anonymous by request. Still selling. Still getting sharper.
