Skip to content
Back to work
Web Design

Akaani Website

Redesigning a Nigerian food tech company's full web presence (homepage, meals page, recipe shop, and about page) to convert visitors into app users and recipe customers.

Role
Lead Product Designer
Timeline
2024 - Present
Platform
Web (Desktop + Mobile)
Year
2024
Visit live site

Screen recording of the live product

The Problem

Akaani had a working product and a real audience, but the website was not doing its job. The homepage buried Lu, Akaani's most distinctive asset, in a section nobody reached. The hero said nothing specific. The testimonials were placeholder lorem ipsum. The "Problem / Solution" framing appeared four times on the same page. The CTA appeared twice with the same wording, which meant neither one had any pull.

The recipe shop had a harder problem. Technically, it did not exist in Google's index at all. Client-side rendering meant Google received an empty loading shell instead of recipe bundle content. A site search confirmed almost nothing beyond the homepage was indexed. Hundreds of potential organic search visitors searching for "jollof rice macros" or "egusi soup calories" were finding nothing.

The meals page was a separate surface with its own set of issues: inconsistent footer navigation, a copyright year still showing 2023, and no clear subscription hierarchy that matched the premium-first pricing model.

My job was to redesign the entire web presence from the ground up: fix the conversion architecture, fix the SEO failures, redesign the visual direction, and make the website feel as premium as the product it was selling.

My Role

I led the full redesign across every page. This included auditing the existing site for conversion and SEO issues, proposing the new information architecture, designing all visual iterations, writing the final copy, and producing the Lu website chat specification that defined how the AI character would behave on the homepage. I worked directly with Susan Olapade (CPO) and Richard Igbiriki (CTO), presenting strategy documents and design decisions at each stage.

Team

Lead Designer (me), CPO: Susan Olapade, CTO: Richard Igbiriki

Outcomes

5

pages redesigned across the full web presence

Homepage, meals, recipe shop, about, Lu chat spec

0

recipe shop pages indexed before the project

Client-side rendering failure diagnosed and documented for engineering fix

8

screen subscription flow built for the meals page

Landing, plan selection, account creation, address, payment, meal selection, confirmation, dashboard

10

Lu conversation scenarios specified

Full restriction scripts mapping every visitor intent to the right response

What I Learned

The Akaani website project taught me that a design audit is not just a visual exercise. The most valuable finding from this project was not a layout problem, it was the client-side rendering failure on the recipe shop that made the entire page invisible to Google. That discovery came from asking the right question: why is no one finding the recipe bundles through search? The other thing this project reinforced is that brand characters need to be used with discipline, not enthusiasm. Every team member loved Lu. That love led to three separate sections about her on the same page, each one saying roughly the same thing. The redesign gave Lu one moment and made it count. When you protect a brand asset by giving it space instead of exposure, it lands harder. If I were starting again, I would have pushed for static rendering of the recipe shop earlier, before any visual design work began. A page that is invisible to search does not need a better layout. It needs to exist in the index first.