Topanga.io
Year: 2026
Role: Lead designer
Type: Web design, interaction design, sales enablement
Collaborators: Hussain Ali (FE), Jenny Nova (PMM)
An interactive buyer journey that shows four different people exactly what buying StreamLine costs them in time.
Topanga builds waste tracking for commercial kitchens.
Their StreamLine product pairs smart scales with software that shows a kitchen what it's actually throwing away, then turns that into production forecasts. Campuses, hospitals, senior living, large food service operations. They brought me in to show prospective buyers what implementing StreamLine actually looks like, week by week.
Problem
StreamLine has hardware in it, so there's no free trial. A prospect can't click around and get a feel for it.
That left a gap where interest turned into hesitation. People would hear the pitch, think it sounded good, then think it sounded like a lot of work. Deals stalled on uncertainty rather than on the product.
The standard fix is a simplified timeline. Food service operators have seen plenty of those and don't believe them, so that approach would have made the trust problem worse.
Challenge
StreamLine gets bought by a committee. A dining director evaluates cost. An exec chef decides if the kitchen can pull it off. A sustainability lead cares about targets. A line cook wants to know what lands on their shift.
All four want to know what happens in week six. All four want to know something different about it.
Approach
You pick who you are, and the timeline reframes around you. Four personas, eight phases, week zero through week thirteen, with a progress rail that fills as you move.
Every card carries a time cost. 45 minutes for the demo. 30 minutes to review the ROI report. 15 minutes on launch day. The hesitation was about effort, so effort became the most visible thing on the page.
Each persona sees what the others are doing. While you're reviewing the contract, Ross is filming a kitchen walkthrough. Four paths, one process.
The line cook path says when nothing happens. For the first three phases, David and Jesse's cards read business as usual. A timeline where everyone is busy at every stage is the kind of thing operators don't buy.
Since the build was going to an outside Webflow contractor, I specced the interactions against components Topanga's site already used. Mobile got its own treatment: dropdown instead of tabs, cards expanded by default, and a second version with the rail removed for the team to compare.
My contribution
Proposed the persona-switching structure over showing all four journeys at once
Designed desktop and mobile in Figma, plus an alternate mobile layout
Specced interactions against existing site components to keep the build in scope
Wrote the annotations and reference links the Webflow developer built from
Ran discovery on what sales already had, so this complemented the ROI calculator instead of repeating it