Cook It
A gamified cooking app with 0 out of 6 users completing the core flow. Here's how I fixed it.
Client
Cook It
Project Timeline
2020
Industry
Food & Beverage, Social Media
Scope of work
User Research
UX/UI Design
Usability Testing
Prototyping
Cook It had a genuinely interesting idea: a social platform where users don't just share recipes — they recreate the exact steps of their cooking process inside a gamified virtual kitchen, building a live, shareable record of how they cook. Think Instagram, but the post is the recipe, and the recipe is the experience.
The founder had launched a first version. It wasn't working.
Cook It's core experience — the virtual kitchen — was failing. Users couldn't understand the product, the interface lacked consistency, and the primary creation flow had zero discoverability.
0 out of 6 users successfully created a recipe.
Rather than rebuilding the product, I focused on the execution. I built a visual system from scratch, redesigned the home feed to earn the tap, and added structured onboarding to teach a novel interaction mechanic.
Who We Were Designing For
Cook It served two distinct user types with very different relationships to food and technology. I built proto-personas from competitive research and validated them through user interviews.
Learners — users looking for inspiration and guidance, who need enough context to feel confident before committing to a recipe.
Creators — users motivated to document and share their process, willing to invest time in a creation flow if it's expressive and rewarding.
While both groups engaged with recipes, their motivations diverged sharply — and that tension would become the central design challenge.
What was broken
Testing the existing app with 6 users revealed a consistent pattern: the interface was confusing, the core mechanic was invisible, and no one could complete the primary flow.
Affinity Mapping
The affinity map surfaced 20+ issues. The call was clear: the core concept was sound — the execution wasn't.
Two areas needed urgent attention: the home feed and the create recipe flow.
Wireframe
What I Fixed
01 — Home Feed: Making Cards Worth Tapping
The original recipe card showed a food photo, a title, and a like count. Not enough to earn a tap from someone who doesn't yet trust the product.
02 — Create Recipe Flow: Teaching the Mechanic Without a Manual
The virtual kitchen was a novel interaction — users had no prior mental model for it. They were dropped into a blank canvas with no context, and left immediately.
I added tutorial as a pragmatic fix, not as an ideal one. The right solution would have been to redesign the mechanic itself — but that was out of scope.
The redesigned flow in action
Looking Back
Revisiting this with more experience, a few things stand out.
The proto-personas were the right call given the timeline — built from competitive research and validated through real user testing. With more time, I'd have recruited users before defining personas, not after.
The tutorial was necessary, but it was also a signal. When users need a tutorial to understand the core mechanic, the mechanic itself needs scrutiny. I'd have run a dedicated round of testing on the virtual kitchen concept alone — not to kill it, but to find where the mental model breaks.
The biggest unresolved tension was the Learner/Creator gap. The creation flow was complex by necessity for Creators — but Learners were being asked to navigate that same complexity just to engage. A cleaner separation of the two experiences would have served both groups better.