Problem

Many home cooks struggle with organizing their favorite recipes, discovering new ones, and efficiently planning meals. Recipes are often scattered across multiple sources—handwritten notes, bookmarked web pages, screenshots, saved TikToks, instagrams and various cooking apps—making it difficult to keep everything in one place. As a result, finding a specific recipe can be time-consuming and frustrating, especially when cooking on the fly. Additionally, the lack of a centralized system leads to ingredient duplication, forgotten meal plans, and missed opportunities to refine personal cooking techniques over time.

While some apps attempt to solve this issue, they often fall short in providing a holistic experience that encompasses not just recipe storage but also seamless integration with meal planning, grocery shopping, and social engagement. Moreover, current solutions do not fully support users in creating their own personalized cookbooks and sharing their unique recipes with a broader audience. This gap in the market presents an opportunity to design an app that offers a comprehensive, intuitive, and interactive cooking experience.

Concept

Custom Recipe Creation: Users can input their own recipes, including ingredients, steps, and personal notes.
Recipe Collection: Save recipes from other websites, store them in the app, and categorize them for easy access.
Ability to Capture Recipes through Photos: Capture images of meals and add them to recipes to make them visually appealing and memorable.
Save Recipes & Create Cookbooks: Organize saved and created recipes into personal cookbooks.
Meal Plan: Build meal plans based on the recipes for the week and adjust them as needed.
Grocery List: Automatically generate shopping lists based on meal plans and saved recipes.
Social & Community: Share recipes publicly, become an author, and receive ratings and feedback from other users.

Research

I analyzed existing recipe apps such as Yummly, Paprika, and Whisk. While these apps offer strong recipe storage and meal planning features, they lack an intuitive way to create custom cookbooks and a strong social component. Our key differentiators:

A seamless recipe creation and organization system
A user-generated content model where anyone can publish their own recipes
An integrated social feedback system to foster engagement and refinement of recipes

The Aspiring Home Chef

Sarah struggles to keep track of her evolving recipes, often loses notes, and wants a way to refine her cooking skills. She wants an intuitive platform to document and improve her personal recipes with ease. Sarah needs a recipe creation tool with step-by-step guidance, the ability to add personal notes, and a way to visually track progress through images.

The Busy Parent

James has limited time to plan meals, often forgets ingredients while shopping, and struggles to balance nutrition and variety. He wants a streamlined way to plan meals for the week, quickly generate grocery lists, and ensure he is cooking balanced meals for his family. James needs a meal planning feature that syncs with grocery lists and allows quick meal swaps based on available ingredients.

The Food Blogger

Olivia Finds it difficult to manage her published recipes, engage with her audience effectively, and get feedback on new dishes. She wants an interactive way to share her recipes, track engagement, and receive ratings and comments from her followers. Olivia needs A social-sharing component where she can publish her recipes, gain visibility, and interact with a community that appreciates her content.

Key Design Features

We started with low-fidelity wireframes to map out the user flow, ensuring ease of navigation between recipe creation, storage, and social sharing. Mid-fidelity prototypes refined the layout, and high-fidelity designs incorporated branding and interactive elements.

Intuitive Recipe Builder – A step-by-step flow to guide users through adding ingredients, instructions, and photos.
Smart Categorization – AI-driven tagging for quick recipe discovery.
Seamless Sharing & Feedback – A one-tap publishing feature with user ratings and comments.
Dynamic Meal Planning & Grocery List Syncing – Auto-populates shopping lists based on saved meal plans.

Home Page & Browse

Meal Type Categories: A prominently displayed section showcasing different meal types such as Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Snacks, and Desserts.
Filters for Easy Search: Users can refine their search using filters for Ingredients, Total Time, and Cuisine to quickly find recipes that fit their needs.
Recently Viewed Recipes: A dedicated section allows users to quickly revisit recipes they have explored, making it easy to continue cooking where they left off.
Suggested Chefs: Personalized recommendations of chefs whose recipes align with the user’s interests and preferences, encouraging exploration of new dishes.
Meal Type Breakdown: A detailed summary displaying various meal types with associated recipes, helping users navigate through different cooking options effortlessly.

New Recipe

The Create New Recipe flow is designed to be intuitive and flexible, allowing users to document their recipes in multiple ways.

1. Writing a Recipe from Scratch
‍Users can manually enter a new recipe with a structured breakdown - including Ingredients, method, images of the step-by-step preparation and additional information such as cook time, prep time, serving size and nutritional info.

2. Copy & Paste a Recipe
‍For convenience, users can copy and paste an existing recipe from another source: A dedicated input field detects structured recipes and formats them accordingly.Users can edit the text before saving to ensure accuracy.

3. Adding a Recipe via Photo Capture
‍Users can take a picture of a handwritten or printed recipe and store it in their catalog.

Import Recipe from Browser

The Import Recipe from Browser feature allows users to seamlessly save recipes from external websites into their personal collection.

Using the In-App Browser Extension, users can browse recipe websites within the app’s built-in browser. A “Save Recipe” button detects structured recipe data on the page and extracts key details such as Recipe Author, Ingredients list etc.

Categorization & Customization: Once imported, users can categorize the recipe under meal type, cuisine, or custom tags.Additional fields such as personal notes or adjustments can be added before finalizing the recipe.

Recipe Info Page

The Recipe Page is designed for clarity, ease of use, and visual appeal, ensuring users can follow along while cooking.

Cookbooks (Saved Recipes)

The Cookbooks feature allows users to organize their saved and created recipes into personalized collections, making it easy to access and categorize dishes.

Profile

The Profile Section serves as the central hub for users to manage their recipes, meal plans, and grocery lists, offering a seamless and personalized cooking experience.

Meal Plan for the Week - A structured weekly meal planner to organize meals in advance. Drag-and-drop functionality to adjust meals within the planner. Integration with saved recipes for quick additions. Ability to generate automatic grocery lists based on selected meals.

Grocery List - A dynamic, auto-generated shopping list based on planned meals. Users can manually add or remove ingredients as needed. Smart categorization groups items by aisle (e.g., dairy, produce, pantry). Option to check off items while shopping.

Social & Community Features - A feed of recent activity, including published recipes and interactions. Option to share meal plans or grocery lists with family or friends. Ability to follow favorite chefs and discover their latest creations.

Future Improvements

To enhance the app’s capabilities and user experience, future updates will include:

Collaborative Cookbooks: Users will be able to invite family and friends to contribute to shared cookbooks, allowing for collective meal planning and recipe organization.

Advanced Sharing Features: Enhanced social integrations, including the ability to share entire cookbooks, meal plans, and grocery lists with others.

AI-Powered Smart Suggestions: Personalized recommendations based on user preferences, past cooking history, and dietary goals.

Automated Ingredient Substitutions: AI-driven suggestions for ingredient swaps based on dietary restrictions or available pantry items.

Voice Command Integration: Hands-free cooking with voice-activated recipe navigation and step-by-step guidance.

Augmented Reality Cooking Assistant: Future exploration of AR overlays to provide real-time cooking assistance, such as measuring ingredient quantities visually.

Conclusion

Seamless Integration Enhances Experience: Connecting recipe storage, meal planning, and grocery lists created a more efficient cooking workflow.

Community-Driven Features Increase Engagement: Allowing users to share, review, and refine recipes fostered a vibrant culinary community.

View Prototype

Next Project

Crafting the Ultimate Recipe App

Bungalow Design System