Year
2025
Client
Stealth Company
Category
App Design
Product Duration
1 Week
Too many recipes. Not enough help.
Most recipe apps bombard you with endless lists, filters, and categories. But when you're hungry, tired, and staring into a sad fridge, you don't want 300 ideas — you want one thing you can cook now. Most platforms start with a recipe-first approach: "What do you want to make?" — but users often don’t know. They just want to use up what’s in their kitchen.
Cooking isn’t about endless options. It’s about starting with what you already have.
I didn’t do user interviews. I explored like a hungry person would.
I analyzed dozens of food apps to see what they offer vs. what they miss. I dove into Reddit threads, Indie Hackers posts, and App Store reviews to find out what real users complain about — and what they wish existed. I also simulated first-time user flows with AI to evaluate clarity and friction.
What I found:
Many apps allow recipe browsing, but very few let you start by entering your ingredients.
When ingredient input is offered, it often leads to irrelevant suggestions, or recipes that still require multiple missing items.
Filters tend to be over-complicated and require a lot of tweaking before you get useful results.
There’s rarely a true "cooking mode". You're left with walls of text or blog-style recipe pages.
Once a recipe is selected, there's no structured experience for following the steps. No progression. No voice. No visual clarity.
Real complaints I gathered:
"Why ask me what ingredients I have if you ignore them?"
"Scrolling while cooking is the worst UX ever."
"Too many steps just to see a recipe."
These gaps became the pillars of my direction. I wasn’t designing another Pinterest for food. I was designing a cooking assistant.
Meet Laura: full-time worker, part-time home chef.
29 years old
Lives in a shared flat
Cooks a few times a week
Doesn’t meal plan, just opens the fridge and hopes for inspiration
Wants to avoid waste but hates overthinking dinner
She uses Pinterest and Instagram for food ideas, but often gets overwhelmed or forgets the recipes. She doesn’t have time to fill out long onboarding flows. She needs speed, simplicity, and confidence.
Laura doesn't want to be a chef. She just wants dinner without stress.