The story behind this work.
I started by building a website for myself — a simple WordPress record of my hobby, photography. Then Covid hit. At that point I was holding down two things at once: a full-time job at a travel and logistics company, while spending years on design courses and training, before I finally landed my first client.
That client was Jakarta Feminist, a local NGO in Jakarta. I was contracted to build three of their websites, and it turned into nearly five years of ongoing support. One thing I learned: the client knew what they wanted, and refused any feature they doubted. They wanted it simple, they wanted it to work, and they wanted input from the people using it. That is what I delivered, and it became the foundation of my design journey. Read the full case study ↗
The site looked successful. But it did not work.
I also noticed most people optimise for what looks good — clean layouts, current animations, pixel-perfect mockups. Clients are delighted at the presentation. Then three months after launch you open the analytics: high bounce rate, low conversion, visitors lost.
The turning point came with a project for a well-known NGO in London. They had already burned budget at two agencies. Both produced beautiful sites. Neither had asked who was actually visiting, why they left, or what the organisation needed from them. I rebuilt it differently — starting from the visitor's anxiety rather than the founder's pride. Adding friction where it was needed, removing it where it was not. Conversion doubled within six weeks. Read the full case study ↗
That is when it clicked: most web projects fail before the first line of code is written. They fail in the brief. In the assumptions. In the gap between what a business thinks it needs and what the customer actually experiences.
Today I work at the intersection of strategy, design, and development — not as three separate stages, but as one continuous decision. I ask the questions that slow a project down, so the launch does not. Every site I build is designed so the right person feels understood in the first thirty seconds, then takes the next step without thinking twice.
