MixMaster
Customizable recipe app for dietary preferences and ingredient swaps
Home cooks and those with specific dietary needs often struggle to find adaptable recipes due to the inflexibility of traditional cookbooks and apps. This challenge, compounded for those seeking simpler and cheaper options, leads to frustration, wasted ingredients, and missed opportunities for enjoyable cooking experiences.
MixMaster solves this problem, allowing users to edit ingredients in existing recipes, change ingredient portions, and substitute ingredients using Gen AI. In this solo concept project, I worked end-to-end from ideation to design.
Role
Product Designer
Timeline
2024 (Summer)
Team
Summary
Problem
Home cooking is frustrating and inefficient due to dietary restrictions, costly ingredients, and unclear instructions, causing wasted time, money, and food.
Solution
MixMaster allows users to easily replace ingredients with alternatives as well as scale ingredient amounts based on their desired portion size.
My Contributions
Conducted user interviews & ethnographic research
Created design system
Designed and iterated concepts from low to high fidelity
Results
Informed by feedback from UX professor and 20+ peers, MixMaster improved recipe adaptability, allowing users to swap ingredients and adjust portions. Users noted the prototype effectively addressed dietary needs, reduced food waste, and simplified meal prep.
Research
I conducted a user interview and spoke with Na, a person who doesn't like to cook food and orders in food daily from food delivery services.
Portioning and waste issues
Na struggles with cooking portions, leading to waste and frustration due to inconsistent amounts of food
Recipe Adaption Challenges
Na faces difficulties with adapting recipes and finding ingredient substitutes, compounded by unclear cooking instructions and videos
To better understand the needs and pain points of home cooks, I followed a Recipe App to put myself in the place of the user.
Gathering ingredients was the biggest pain point of my cooking experience. This process was too expensive, time consuming, and it was difficult to get the correct portions that I needed.
Lucy
Home-cook
Project Manager, Brooklyn
Aspiration
"I want to make recipes more time efficient and budget friendly so I can enjoy my time outside. And more importantly, recipes I can eat!"
Frustrations
avoiding allergens and food intolerances
recipes using too many ingredients
long cooking times
Interests
traveling
exploring new cultures & cuisines
I looked at other Recipe apps to see where MixMaster fits within the cooking recipe market, seeing areas of opportunity.
HMW
How might I help home cooks edit their recipes to fit their cooking needs?
Ideation
Prototype
