Cooklie: Your All-in-One Kitchen Buddy & Recipe Customizer
Empowering home cooks to replicate, personalize, scale, and share recipes seamlessly through a community-driven platform featuring smart ingredient adjustments and a hands-free cooking assistant.
Context
The Business Problem
Cooking at home while replicating professional recipes often introduces a frustrating friction loop. Standardized recipes rarely match individual palates—especially when it comes to spice levels, salt, or seasoning—forcing cooks to mentally adjust quantities on the fly.
The Legacy Bottleneck & Memory Gap
While home cooks frequently tweak recipes to suit their taste, retaining those specific modifications requires manual note-taking scattered across notebooks or notes apps. Furthermore, finding ingredient substitutes or scaling serving sizes for gatherings requires tedious manual math, while discovery remains fragmented across disconnected blogs and video platforms.
The Stakes
Without a centralized, intelligent kitchen companion that bridges recipe discovery, personal customization, and execution, home cooks experience high cognitive load, recipe abandonment, and a lack of creative community connection.
Collaboration
Founding Partner & Engineering Synergy
Collaborated directly with my engineer co-founder in a rapid 0-to-1 build cycle, defining technical constraints and core architecture from day one to ensure design scalability.
Defining the User Journey & Pain Points
Conducted qualitative research with passionate home cooks to map out the exact lifecycle of cooking—from discovering a creator's recipe to the messy, hands-on execution phase in the kitchen.
Scoping for MVP Velocity
Strategically prioritized core utility features (dynamic serving scaling, substitute search, and the step-by-step cook mode) to launch a high-impact MVP without bloating engineering timelines.
Design Exploration
Designing for Hands-Free Kitchen Ergonomics
Prototyped user flows specifically tailored for high-motion environments—exploring large touch targets, voice-automated guidance, and integrated timers to ensure users never have to touch their devices with messy hands.
Figma Architecture & Modular UI
Built a scalable, component-driven design library in Figma featuring intuitive customization states, recipe-saving cards, and a clean social feed framework for following peer chefs.
Design Solution
The final 0-to-1 product architecture delivered a comprehensive kitchen ecosystem through targeted modules:
Dynamic Recipe Personalization & Memory Engine
Allows users to edit and save customized ingredient tweaks (like adjusting salt and spice levels) directly onto any saved recipe, eliminating the need for manual note-taking.
Smart Serving Scaler
Instantly recalculates exact ingredient quantities when users change the desired number of servings.
Instant Substitute Search
Built-in suggestion tool that provides alternative ingredients on the fly, preventing mid-cooking roadblocks.
Hands-Free Recipe Play-Along Mode
An immersive, step-by-step voice-automated guide integrated with smart timers to keep users completely hands-free while cooking.
Chef Community & Discovery Feed
A social layer where users can follow favorite creators, publish their own custom recipes, and share culinary variations.
Outcomes & Learnings
Strategic Design Takeaways
Context Dictates UI: Designing for physical environments (like a kitchen) requires prioritizing high legibility, large touch targets, and hands-free interactions over dense layouts.
Personalization Drives Retention: Giving users the agency to permanently alter and save recipes to their personal taste transforms a generic content app into an indispensable daily utility.
Retrospective & What I Would Do Next
Next Steps: Future iterations will explore pantry-inventory tracking (recommending recipes based on what ingredients are already expiring in your fridge) and smart-grocery list generation.
