Roles
UX Development
Wire framing
Prototyping
Usability Testing
Team
Design Team (2)
User Research (3)
Data Collection and Visualization (3)
Project Manager (1)
Mentor (1)
Timeline
Four Weeks
Feb 2, 2025 - March 4, 2025
Tools
Figma
Adobe Creative Cloud
Jitter
The Dish Discovery app that allows home cooks to share their food experiences with intentionality and connect with other cultures of cuisine.
Moonshot 2nd Cohort
Potpourri
recipes are naturally crowdsourced
the prepwork
The Problem: There’s no app that connects recipes with the rich history and cultural stories behind them. While recipe books provide instructions, they often lack the narratives (other than a small blurb) that reveal how dishes are interconnected across cultures and time.
The Goal: We wanted to show that food isn’t just about ingredients—it’s about heritage, migration, and shared traditions. Our app is meant to present an opportunity that not only guides users through making a dish but also immerses them in its story, creating a more meaningful and enriching cooking experience.
73.8% felt a sense of belonging through recipe stories.
90% of participants cook dishes inspiried by cultural background (40%) or are interested in doing so (50%)
78% of research participants value clarity and concision when following new recipes.
78% of participants are influenced by factors of convenience when trying new recipes.
95% of participants doscover their recipes through an online source.
We conducted a google survey where we wanted to explore how home cooks discover new recipes, share their food experiences, and connect with different food cultures.
Step 1: When it comes to creating a dish, we want to get all the ingredients and start the prepwork
user research
Age: 24, Taiwanese - American, Product Designer, Frugal
Sonia is a designer from NYC who is a big food enthusiast. Recently, she has been making more home-cooked meals instead of buying takeout to save money, and is on the hunt for new recipes. However, she wishes they were beginner-friendly for novice chefs like her. She started off learning basic meals, but now is ready to expand her cooking horizon and learn more diverse meals.
The food she makes is not to her liking
Not knowing how to cook restaurant-style meals
Lacks a community of beginner chefs
Pain Points
About Sonia
Sonia Hsu
Age: 40, Based in San Francisco for the majority of his life, Big Foodie, Light Work Schedule
Ryan recently switched jobs to a remote schedule and light hours, and now has a lot of time on his hands. He recently moved to San Francisco, and is exploring the vast food scene. His favorite cuisine is Mediterranean. and wants to start cooking authentic Mediterranean dishes similar to his favorite Mediterranean restaurant in the city. He wants to start documenting his cooking journey and learn more about Mediterranean dishes from different countries.
Not knowing how to cook meals from a specific cuisine
Lack of knowledge from where his dishes come from
Wants to get reviews from his meals
Pain Points
About Ryan
Ryan Adams
seasonings
Step 2: After prepping your ingredients, let us lay out the seasonings that give the dish that unique flair
These were some of our personal core values we wanted to implement when developing the app.
Blurbs are written for SEO hits for the blogger's business, losing good user experience.
The receipe steps themselves have become impersonal with precise measurements, without soul.
Research participants are largely motivated by convenience and clarity when trying new recipes.
Clarity of Conversation
Sociocultural
Food culture is important for context, appreciation, and novelty for new eaters.
People want authenticity, community, and resonance with personal stories.
Majority of participants are interested in discovering dishes based on cultural background or occasionally do so.
But access to cuisines and systemic barriers of availability create friction.
mix it all together
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Step 3: After gathering all the ingredients it is time to mix it all up!
My other teammate and I hashed out a brief outline of what we want the app to look like for our first wireframe.
Key Findings
Overall from the evaluation, we found 4 main problems within the prototype and we focused them into their own category.
We made sure to tackle all of these in our final iterations of the app.
Users wanted a way to leave comments, allowing personal tips for suggestions or just notes as they go through recipes.
Users like the categories and trending sections, but were unsure of what "trending" meant (did not know it was a button as well).
Users liked the small blurb but felt like it clashed visually with the recipe itself.
The review system was confusing due to decimal ratings.
Here are a few frames from our final iteration. We refined the color scheme to complement the dishes beautifully, creating a visually appealing experience. We also introduced interactive features, allowing users to add public or private comments to specific recipes. To enhance usability, we redesigned the navigation bar, transforming the tags into button-like elements for a more intuitive experience. Additionally, we updated the ratings system to display whole numbers with stars, eliminating any confusion caused by decimal values.
plating the dish
Step 4: Voila! The dish is ready! Now all we have to do is plate it
your dish is ready!
This was our final iteration of the app!
takeaways!
This was my first time completing a case study within such a short timeframe. While it was certainly stressful, I also had a lot of fun! Given more time, I would have enhanced the kumu.io map to be more interactive, allowing users to zoom in and click on elements that lead directly to their corresponding recipe and history pages.
I definitely plan to revisit this project for a second iteration. These past few weeks have been an invaluable learning experience, teaching me the importance of teamwork, collaboration, and designing with intentionality around the user’s needs.