The Silva Spoon
Category
UI/UX Design
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Tools
Figma, FigJam
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Year
Redesigning the website for a much loved Maroochydore tea house, giving café guests and online tea shoppers a clear way in.
Project Overview
The Silva Spoon has been part of Maroochydore since 2009 - a tea house, café and high tea venue with a. long list of awards and more than 70 teas blended by hand. Anyone who walked in knew exactly what it was. Anyone who found it online had a much harder time working that out. The site was trying to serve two very different audiences and wasn't doing right by either. The homepage was long, led by a repetitive hero carousel and gave nobody a clear next step. Café guests couldn't book a high tea without picking up the phone and online shoppers were dropped into a large, flat catalogue with very little to help them choose.
Solution
The goal was to design a website that gave two distinct groups their own clear path from the moment they arrived:
café and high tea guests who want to see what's on offer and book without a phone call
online tea shoppers who need help finding the right blend among 70+ options
I worked in a team of three over May and June 2026. We ran the research, strategy and design direction together and agreed on the principles, sitemap and visual system before anyone started a high-fidelity frame, then split the MVP pages between us. I designed the High Tea page and its booking flow.
Research
A heuristic evaluation of the existing site confirmed what the client had already told us: a homepage with no clear conversion pathways, product categorisation and search well below standard and the biggest pain point was the fact that there was no real booking functionality.
We then interviewed 5 people, split between diners/who book café experiences and online shoppers who wanted to buy tea online. The following themes surfaced from these interviews:
Discovery: people decide fast. One café-goer said she's leave if she couldn't work out what a place offered within a few seconds. Another wanted to know, almost immediately, what it is, roughly what it costs and how to book
Trust: a clean, detailed site earns it. Transparent pricing, real photos and genuine reviews did a lot of quiet persuading and their absence was disqualifying
Booking: Nobody wanted to make a phone call. One participant needed three separate calls to book a high tea experience for her mum's birthday and yet another described planning a birthday high tea as being high effort
Two findings were close to unanimous. Every café-focused participant asked for menus with pricing, dietary options, photos and a real booking system. And every e-commerce focused participant described being overwhelmed by large, unfiltered tea catalogues. They weren't asking for fewer teas, just for a way in. Participants wanted to browse by type, flavour or mood, with bestsellers and staff picks to reduce the guesswork.
We then assessed three competitors' websites against our two audiences:
Shingle Inn City Hall: the closest direct competitor, with dine-in and an online shop. Real heritage warmth, but its high tea menu sat in a PDF which we found to be painful on mobile devices and hard for search engines and AI to pick up in searches
T2: the national retailer and the client's favourite brand. Excellent photography and clean category tiles, but it's a brand and not a place you can visit for high tea/café
Tea Tonic: pure e-commerce. The smartest categorisation of the three, wrapped in rainbow branding that was the opposite of what we needed.
Three patterns stood out - that tea discover was the biggest opportunity and that categorisation was the current site's weakest point. Nobody served both audiences well, which left the space between visiting and buying open for The Silva Spoon. And premium came from restraint: the brands that felt premium kept their layouts clean and let photography carry them.
We distilled all of it into a problem statement to keep the team pointed the same way:
The Silva Spoon serves two audiences: café visitors and online tea shoppers, but its website doesn't effectively support either. Café guests can't book a high tea without picking up the phone, and online shoppers are left to scroll through more than 70 blends with little to guide them. The tea house has the awards and the product, the website just isn't letting either shine through.
Ideation
Before sketching anything, we set 3 core principles that would guide all our design work:
Two doors, one home: clear pathways for both audiences from the first click with neither sidelined
Guide, don't overwhelm: curated browsing instead of endless scrolling
Friction-free booking: self-service in three steps or fewer, with instant confirmation
We then formulated our 'how might we' questions to encourage ideation and solution-oriented thinking.
Challenge Identified | How Might We Question |
|---|---|
First-time visitors can't quickly tell what The Silva Spoon offers | How might we help first-time visitors quickly understand what The Silva Spoon offers? |
Both audiences land on the same homepage with no clear path | How might we send online shoppers and in-person visitors to their own experience without either feeling sidelined? |
Bookings depend on phone calls | How might we replace manual booking with a system that gives instant confidence that a high tea, table or cake is confirmed? |
A large catalogue overwhelms first-time buyers | How might we help people navigate a large tea catalogue with confidence, especially first-time buyers? |
Award-winning quality needs to come through without feeling boastful | How might we show the awards and expertise without it ever feeling like the brand is trying too hard? |
Plotting our priorities on an impact/effort matrix, we identified 3 core pages as our MVP:
Homepage: the single most critical page because it's where both audiences arrive and where the site must immediately answer the question: 'is this for me'?
Café & High Tea page: this page serves users who want to visit The Silva Spoon in person, view menus, pricing and actually make a booking
Tea Catalogue page: this page would serve the core of The Silva Spoon's online tea shop where users browse, discover and select teas to purchase
Design Concepts & Visual Identity
The brand already existed - the logo, colours, fonts. Our job was to decide how these assets behaved, where every element has to earn its place and tweak some of the aspects to improve visual cohesiveness, such as selecting 2 to 3 fonts instead of the 5+ fonts that were in use.
Deliverables & Outcome
The final deliverables were three high-fidelity desktop pages for the Homepage, the High Tea page with the full booking flow and the tea catalogue as well as a sitemap for the full site and a visual identity guide covering logo usage, typography, colour, photography and UI.
Café & High Tea
The hero leads with two actions - a big, prominent button to 'Book a High Tea', so anyone ready to book never has to scroll and a Learn more button that will enable users to browse through the high tea packages, dietary information and more.
The two packages follow as side-by-side cards with photos, inclusions and a clear per-person price. Directly beneath, the page states dietary options, any surcharges and the specialty drinks guests can swap in. Every café-focused participant had asked exactly this, and almost none of it was finable on the old site.
The booking flow holds to the 3-step principle. One pill-shaped selector captures guests, date and time. A short form takes the package, contact details and dietary notes. One button books it. The confirmation screen returns a booking reference, a summary and the address, with share and print options, so there's no lingering doubt about whether it actually went through.
The rest of the page builds confidence and keeps people moving:
an 'as seen at our table' carousel of guest photos that tagged The Silva Spoon on social media
cross-links to the café, cakes and the tea catalogue
and a visit section with the map, opening hours and contact details.
The Homepage and Tea e-Commerce pages
My teammates carried the other two MVP pages, both built from the same shared system.
The Homepage open on an award-winning hero and splits immediately into 'Visit Us' and 'Shop Tea', each door with its own voice and call to action, directly addressing one of the major pain point we identified earlier. Below it, the awards and the owners' story carry the trust signals, a few curated teas preview the catalogue and a 'come and sit a while' section surfaces opening hours and the next available high tea slot.
The Tea catalogue leads with 'Seventy-eight teas, hand-blended on the Sunshine Coast' hook, with functionalities and features such as search, colour-coded category chips, filters and sorting. For easy discoverability, product cards are tagged with bestsellers, staff pick, new blend tags and a guided browsing bar offers a 2 minute quiz for anyone unsure on where to start.
Reflection & Next Steps
The best outcome a project like this can have: the client built it! The redesign is live which means the two doors, the booking flow and the curated catalogues aren't proposals in a Figma file anymore. Guests book their own high tea and nobody has to make three phone calls to organise their mum's birthday.
It also means the questions we couldn't answer from a design file are finally answerable. Do people pick a door or scroll past both? Do the category filters get used or do first-time buyers still bounce? That's where I'd take this next, with live behaviour and analytics data replacing the usability testing we never got to run due to limited time and scope.
