Product Design
Making Everyday Cooking Feel More Natural and Personal for Home Chefs
Duration
14 weeks
Feb 2025 - Dec 2025
My Role
Product Designer, Design Lead
Team
Gloria Yang (me), Conner Meek, Clair Paisley, Rohini Raj Rajan
Home chefs often improvise by adjusting ingredients, steps, or portions on the fly. But without a way to track those changes, they miss the opportunity to reflect, repeat, or improve their creations.
A digital solution that helps home cooks capture and refine their recipe creations
Designed to make cooking more personal, flexible, and reflective, it allows home chefs to track on-the-fly recipe changes, organize modifications, and revisit successful experiments. Built through a full design thinking process, from research and synthesis to prototyping and testing, the solution empowers creativity in the kitchen while reducing the friction of keeping notes.
A simple, guided tool for budgeting and financial literacy that empowering international students in the U.S. to build sustainable finance habits.
What Home Chefs Really Need?
To better understand the goals, habits, and challenges of home chefs, we set out to explore not only how people follow recipes, but also how they adapt them, store them, and evolve their cooking practices over time.
This led us to ask ourselves: How do home chefs capture and refine their recipe changes, and what obstacles do they face in keeping track of them?
Interviewed 8 home chefs to uncover their motivations, habits, and frustrations
Mapped interview findings using affinity mapping to identify recurring themes
Analyzed strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats through SWOT analysis
Compared existing recipe platforms to highlight market gaps and limitations through competitive analysis
What We Learned from Our Users?
From our research, three recurring themes stood out. These insights reveal the diverse needs and challenges that home cooks face in their everyday routines and became the foundation for how we shaped the design problem and prioritized features.
High Diversity in Cooking Styles
Users approach cooking differently, with unique tastes, methods, and routines.
Need for Personalization
Recipes are frequently adjusted, but users lack an easy way to record and revisit those changes
Fragmented Recipe Storage
Recipes are collected from multiple sources and stored in scattered formats.
With these findings, our focus shifted from simply organizing recipes to enabling users to both personalize and retrieve them with ease.
Where Current Cooking Apps Fall Short
While many cooking apps exist, none provide comprehensive support across the entire cooking journey. Most focus on static instructions, but don’t reflect the creative, messy process that real home cooks go through.
From our review of recipe platforms, we found key gaps:
Real-time Note-taking
No way to capture changes while cooking
Tracking Personal Recipe Changes
Limited support for evolving dishes over time
Comparing Versions
No easy way to view different variations of the same recipe
Outcome Feedback
Little to no support for reflecting on what worked or not
These gaps highlighted a clear opportunity: designing a tool that embraces personalization and iteration, rather than treating recipes as one-size-fits-all.
How might we help home chefs keep track of the modifications they’ve made to recipes, so that they can further develop their cooking practice?
Home chefs often view cooking as both practical and creative, but current tools fail to support the messy, experimental side of the process. Many:
Struggle to remember modifications they made on the fly
Collect recipes from fragmented sources and formats
Find it hard to organize and revisit different versions of one recipe
Meet Remy - Our Experimental Home Chef
Remy represents passionate home cooks who view cooking as both a daily utility and a creative outlet. She values flexibility in the kitchen and wants a simple way to document and revisit recipe changes without disrupting her flow.
💡 Motivations: Driven by personal taste, mood, and the joy of creating something new in the kitchen
🎯 Goals: Track recipe modifications, revisit successful experiments, and build a flexible cooking workflow
😩 Frustrations: Forgets what she changed, struggles to organize recipe versions, and finds multitasking with messy hands and tech frustrating
From Chaos to Clarity: Designing for the Real Cooking Process
We explored a wide range of ideas, from ingredient-based search and community sharing to automatic suggestions and version trees. After prioritizing based on user needs and feasibility, we defined four core features to bring clarity and flexibility to real-world cooking practice:
Add Recipe
Save from the web, cookbooks, notes, or create from scratch
Edit Recipe
Quickly update ingredients or steps of the recipe on the fly
Cook Mode
Hands-free guidance with voice input for messy kitchen moments
Version History
Track changes and compare versions to refine dishes over time
Validating Our Designs with Real Home Chefs
To evaluate the usability of our core features, we conducted moderated usability testing with eight participants who regularly cook and modify recipes at home. The sessions focused on observing how home chefs interacted with the prototype and see where they felt confident, and where they encountered friction.
This process helped us validate our design decisions, uncover usability gaps, and identify opportunities to enhance the overall experience.
What Users Loved?
Clean & Intuitive Layout
Participants appreciated the simple structure that made it easy to scan recipes and navigate between features.
Helpful Metadata
Elements like cooking time, version number, and tags (e.g., “vegetarian”) helped users quickly assess a recipe’s fit.
Voice Input in Cook Mode
Hands-free interaction was seen as especially helpful while multitasking in the kitchen.
Recipe Evolution Feature
Participants loved seeing how a recipe evolved over time, calling it “useful” and “something other apps don’t offer.”
Challenge #1: How might we make version history easier for user to find and revisit?
Finding:
7 out of 8 users missed the version history icon and assumed versioning would live on the recipe details page, causing missed functionality.
Design Opportunity:
Add clearer entry points to the version history on the recipe details page and maintain consistent icon placement across screens.
Challenge #2: How might we make users feel confident that their modified recipes are saved and visible to them?
Finding:
5 out of 8 users expected to see both original and modified recipes on the homepage, which led to confusion about whether their changes were saved.
Design Opportunity:
Encourage creativity by showing both original recipes and modified recipes upfront on the homepage and visually distinguishing personal versions from originals.
Challenge #3: How might we ensure users that their notes or modifications are saved while cooking?
Finding:
6 out of 8 users weren’t confident that their notes or modifications added when using Cook Mode were actually saved, creating anxiety that disrupted their flow.
Design Opportunity:
Build trust and transparency by introducing real-time autosave indicators and clear confirmation messages when notes or modifications are successfully recorded and saved.
Translating Insights into a Confident and Creative Cooking Experience for Home Chefs
After multiple rounds of iteration and testing, we refined Chef’d into a tool that supports home chefs through every stage of their creative process, from their very first recipe to their most perfected dishes.
We showcased the final design through two key user flows:
Remy's First Time Using Chef'd
Three Months Later — Remy’s Millionth Time Using Chef’d
What Our Users Said About Chef’d?
Users loved the concept of Chef’d and shared how it could meaningfully improve their cooking routines:
These reactions validated our vision for Chef’d is an intuitive, expressive, and confidence-building tool that fits naturally into everyday cooking.
What's Next for Chef’d?
As we look ahead, we envision Chef’d growing beyond personal use into a more connected, intelligent, and collaborative platform:
Nested Recipe Versions
Enable users to make modifications to modified recipes and view them in a nested structure.
Smart Suggestions
Introduce ingredient swaps or edit prompts based on cooking goals, patterns, and preferences.
Social Sharing and Discovery
Allowing users to share their personalized recipes with the community and discover others’ creations
Collaborative Cooking
Supporting co-editing or sharing drafts with friends or family to cook together or exchange recipes
Our Reflections!
This project was not only about designing a product but also about learning how to design as a team, for real users, and with adaptability.
These reactions validated our vision for Chef’d is an intuitive, expressive, and confidence-building tool that fits naturally into everyday cooking.