Building a streamlined recipe keeping app, simplifying discovery & organization
May 2024
Role
Solo designer
Tools
Figma
Marker & paper- sketching
ChatGPT
Jitter
Overview
RecipEasy is a mobile app concept designed to simplify how users save, organize, and share recipes from across the web. It cuts through the clutter of long winded and ad-heavy recipe blogs by surfacing only the essentials: ingredients, instructions, and ratings. Users can build custom collections, import recipes from any site, and easily share them through an integrated social platform.
The problem
For home cooks, online recipe discovery often means wading through a sea of ads, personal anecdotes, and poor organizational tools.
Existing platforms fall short; either cluttered with irrelevant content or lacking a centralized place to save, organize, and share recipes. Users often resort to screenshots, messy bookmark folders, or texting links to themselves.
The objective
My original goal was to solve a common user frustration: long, cluttered recipe blogs.
But through research, I uncovered a larger opportunity: users didn’t just want cleaner recipe formats, they really needed a better system to manage, access, and share recipes altogether. This case study showcases how I used user research, prototyping, and iterative design to create a functional, intuitive app centered around real needs.
Research methods
Desk research
Moderated interviews
I began with some desk research, uncovering that not only do 88% of all consumers search for recipes online, but that they also struggle with scattered saving methods and ad-heavy content.
To dive deeper, I interviewed five home cooks in an in-person, moderated format to understand habits, annoyances, and preferences around discovering, saving, and organizing recipes.
User surveys
Key insights
Users want clarity and simplicity in recipe content.
Interviewees repeatedly cited major frustration with ads and overly long anecdotes when searching most websites for recipes.
Trust is crucial. Things like ratings, familiar recipe sources, and community feedback matter when selecting a new recipe.
Sharing recipes is clunky and fragmented. Sharing recipes online is just as messy as saving them. No streamlined way to organize recipes in general, passing one along to a friend is often clunky and frustrating.
Organization is hugely important. Home cooks rely on taking screenshots, updating notes apps, emailing themselves, and bookmarking websites as their source of safe keeping recipes.
These insights directly informed major design decisions, such as prioritizing a clean recipe format, including agregaratings for credibility, and creating a centralized collection system to save and organize both online and personal recipes.
Synthesis
Empathy mapping highlights
I generated two empathy maps to organize insights from my interviews into two distinct groups based on differences in overall needs and behaviors.
55+ users prioritize recipe trustworthiness and often print copies to remain organized
Personas
To really capture the big generational differences in my user base, I created two personas that emulated recipe habits, needs, and tech behaviors of each group.
Katie, 20-54 y/o gen: Loses track of saved recipes and finds blogs annoying.
Anne, 55+ gen: Wants a reliable, sharable space for both online and family recipes.
20 – 54 y/o users want speed and convenience when locating recipes and when cooking
User Flows
I used my synthesis data to uncover what users needed most and where they struggled, which helped shape the red-route flows that guided my wireframing.
Onboarding flow
After creating an account, users can set personal preferences such dietary restrictions, allergies, or follow favorite food bloggers.
Translating insights into features
Direct recipe access: eliminate fluff, utilize Ai to surface only essential recipe info from websites.
Implement effective organization: build one tool, not five workarounds.
Built-in trust: incorporate aggregate user ratings and transparent recipe sources.
Easy sharing: simple, familiar messaging and recipe sharing in-app.
Visuals
Wireframes
I created hi-fi wireframes early on to get a clearer sense of RecipEasy’s structure and feel using a framework built from my synthesized research data.
Testing and iteration revealed that users saw browsing and searching as one experience, which led me to merge the homepage and discovery screens for a more intuitive flow.
Design system
Calming blue/purple accent color to maintain friendly tone
Light, minimal interface to let content shine
Black accents prioritize important action items for accessibility
Rounded corners & generous spacing for a modern, approachable feel
High-fidelity prototype
Simple organization
One-tap heart button saves recipes to a customizable collection.
Outcomes of my second round of user testing led to key usability tweaks that greatly increased flow and overall usability.
Clearer buttons
Increased contrast & visibility of the "Save" button.
Onboarding
After creating an account, users can select preferences like dietary restrictions, cuisines, or favorite chefs to immediately personalize their home feed.
Easier editing
Streamlined adding & editing ingredients and measurements.
Sharing recipes with friends
An integrated chat feature lets users send and receive recipes directly, no more juggling screenshots or emails.
A social feature connects friends and family to browse each other’s recipe collections, similar to Pinterest.
Home feed
Curated home feeds feature trending, seasonal, and personalized recipe suggestions along with the latest recipes saved by followed users.
Combines discovery and saved recipes into one dynamic, social feed.
Recipe import & organization
Users can create and save their own recipes from home, keeping everything organized in one place.
Or import from any site, stripping away ads and long-winded stories to extract only relevant recipe information.
Learnings
The enormous value of research forward design. What started as a project to cut down the clutter of long winded recipe blog turned into something much bigger and totally different. I realized through my research and interviews that the real pain wasn’t the extra noise in recipe blogs/websites, but that people had nowhere to save and organize all the recipes they found online. I totally shifted this projects’ focus to built a flexible, modern recipe keeping platform that actually solves this problem by helping home cooks keep everything in one place- no printing, handwriting, or screenshot chaos required!
Another big takeaway for me was learning how to keep things simple without stripping away functionality. I realized through numerous rounds of testing that even the most useful features can feel overwhelming if they’re not clear or intuitive. It really drove home the idea that good design isn’t just about looking nice, but making people feel confident and in total control of the product.
