How might we streamline cooking education and recipe discovery for young adults?
Soo acts as a second voice in the kitchen
Understands preferences, goals, & ingredients
Encourages discovery & exploration without the overwhelm
Results & impact
Soo won third place at CUXD's Design-a-thon — Cornell university's annual student design competition! Really grateful to have gotten the opportunity to participate and challenge ourselves by working within a short sprint :]
VIEW THE PROJECT PROCESS
The challenge
This year, UXD @ Cornell challenged teams to rethink everyday experiences; focusing on improving routines, interactions, or systems.
"Design a digital application or product that reimagines one aspect of daily life"
We reflected on common frustrations ourselves and our peers have felt and found shared pain points around cooking and meal management.
Soo set out to explore & answer:
How can we make home cooking feel more approachable and intuitive for beginner, college aged cooks?
Uncovering friction in the cooking journey
We sent out a survey to 20 young adults (ages 18-24) to understand how they are currently managing their food and everyday meals.
Through asking open-ended questions, we gathered information that addressed our users’ overarching lifestyles and meal management behaviors.
We utilized Claude as a research partner through our process to help synthesize and make sense of our data collection.
Patterns
70%
reported that grocery costs were their primary motivator for wanting to cook more at home.
> 50%
reported that recipes online are often hard to follow, overwhelming, or inaccessible.
60%
stated that deciding what to cook can be stressful and report feeling recipe fatigue.
Identifying where existing solutions fall short
Alongside our survey collection, we also conducted a competitive analysis to compare various features of meal planning and recipe apps against a list of 2 direct and 2 indirect competitors.
Read more about our user research and synthesis HERE ↗
Key pain points across the cooking experience
Decision overload
Young adults struggle to decide what to cook, especially when ingredients don’t align with items they already have.
An intimidating & unforgiving learning curve
Recipes often assume prior knowledge, leaving beginners without guidance when they’re unsure or make mistakes.
A fragmented journey
From discovering recipes to shopping for ingredients, the experience is spread across disconnected tools and steps.
Feature solutions & design thinking
*We used Figma & code through our design process to craft a design system and create interactive prototypes
Design focus #1 — Simplifying meal decisions while encouraging discovery
Understanding users & building a foundation for personalization
The onboarding intake was designed to capture goals, cooking comfort level, and dietary needs upfront, giving Soo enough context to make recommendations feel relevant from the start.
Design focus #2 — Bridging discovery & action in an approachable way
A companion through every step
Rather than relying on rigid search or static recipe instructions, users can interact with Soo through chat or voice. A friendly avatar gives the assistant a recognizable presence, while multiple interaction modes let users choose how they want to engage and discover.
Learnings & reflection
Validate with data
What's next?
In the future, we plan on pushing conversational chat experiences further and exploring how it could be made more meaningful and transformative. This would mean challenging familiar interaction patterns and rethinking what AI in cooking experiences can look and feel like. Stay tuned :D
Happy to chat about more about the full design process, tradeoffs, and explorations involved with this project. Please reach out!
