A design challenge where I conducted user research, testing, and design iterations, which resulted in Chef’d, a recipe app built around how people actually cook: by improvising, adjusting, and rarely following a recipe exactly as written.
Recipes are a static, fixed set of instructions. But that’s rarely how people actually cook. Home cooks swap ingredients, adjust spice levels, and improvise constantly, and almost none of that gets remembered anywhere.
“Recipes lead us to believe that cooking is a linear process, while most good food results from a circular one, like a spiderweb: touch one part and the entire thing will quiver.”
Samin Nosrat, author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat
That idea became our design question: how might we help home chefs keep track of the modifications they make to recipes, so they can reflect on, repeat, and evolve their cooking practice over time?
Initially starting this project, we had the hypothesis that users don’t organize their recipes online, that recipes get saved in TikTok, Instagram, the Notes app, and anywhere else. We followed a standard design thinking process, but our early research quickly complicated our assumptions about what “organization” even meant to a home cook.
Through our conversations with people, we realized that home cooks stray from recipes they find while cooking but don’t document the changes they make to the recipes.
We narrowed a wide field of early concepts, including community collaboration, recipe family trees, and mood-based organization, down to four features that most directly answered our design question.
We built out a mid-fi version of our app and ran eight moderated usability sessions, thirty to forty-five minutes each, asking participants to modify a recipe, use cook mode, and find a previous version. Testing revealed three key findings.
Finding 01
A feature nobody can find might as well not exist. We moved version history out of a secondary menu and into the recipe detail view itself, right where someone would already be looking when they wanted it.
Finding 02
People assumed the recipes they’d personalized would be the first thing they saw, not something buried behind their original, unedited versions. We rebuilt the homepage to surface modified recipes front and center, while keeping them differentiated from the original recipes.
Finding 03
The feature didn’t make users feel secure about their modifications being saved. We added explicit, visible confirmation every time a note was captured in cook mode, so trust wasn’t something users had to take on faith.
The pattern across all three: visibility equals trust. A powerful feature still fails if people can’t see their own work reflected back at them.
As we moved into hi-fi design, we wanted every part of Chef’d, down to the smallest interaction, to feel professional and polished. That standard applied everywhere, including the handful of seconds most teams treat as an afterthought.
Chef’d was presented at Pratt InfoShow 2025, had a very strong, positive reaction, and was named an audience favorite.
If I were to continue on this project, I would want to develop:
Chef’d was built by myself, Connor, Gloria, and Rohini. This team taught me so much about teamwork, especially about playing to each other’s strengths and learning from one another along the way. It’s a lesson that stuck with me, and working alongside this team was something I genuinely enjoyed.
