Receta
Your personal cooking companion for learning and confidence in the kitchen 🍳✨
Project Overview
Receta helps beginner and intermediate cooks collect, organize, and learn from their recipes in one place. Users can import recipes from blogs, PDFs, and even videos to build a personal cookbook that feels approachable and fun.This project followed the Goal-Directed Design process to ensure every decision was backed by real user goals and behaviors.
The Challenge
Cooking inspiration is everywhere, but organization isn’t. People save recipes in countless places - social media, screenshots, and browser tabs - but struggle to actually use them. Beginners feel especially overwhelmed by long recipe blogs, confusing steps, or inconsistent formats. How might we help home cooks collect, organize, and confidently cook from their recipes without the frustration of scattered sources?
The Process
Receta was designed through five key phases of Goal-Directed Design:
1. Research – Understanding how people cook, save, and learn.
2. Modeling – Creating personas to represent real goals and frustrations.
3. Requirements – Translating insights into functional, human-centered features.
4. Framework – Establishing structure and layout patterns for usability.
5. Refinement – Iterating on visuals, interactions, and emotional tone.
Research
To uncover how users currently engage with recipes, I conducted user interviews, a literature review, and a competitive audit. I organized findings through affinity mapping to highlight behavioral trends and needs.
Key Insights:
• Cooking inspiration often comes from social media or friends.
• Users want simple, visual, and easy-to-scan recipes.
• Beginners need reassurance and quick wins.
• Long written content adds cognitive load and discourages use.
• Video recipes are popular but hard to organize.
• Users want a way to categorize and customize their recipes.
Two personas guided design decisions:
Bianca — The Beginner
Wants to gain confidence, understand cooking basics, and organize saved recipes without feeling lost.
Kevin — The Social Cook
Enjoys experimenting, sharing recipes, and connecting with other food enthusiasts.These personas kept the team focused on clarity, community, and personalization throughout the process.
Requirements
Using our personas, I created a requirements list that mapped each feature to a user goal and context of use.
Core Features:
• Import recipes from blogs, videos, and PDFs
• Auto-extract only relevant steps and ingredients
• Organize recipes into a personal cookbook
• Scale ingredient amounts automatically
• Build grocery lists from recipes
• Access quick help for cooking basics
• Celebrate progress with encouraging messages
Prototype
Using Figma, I designed a high-fidelity prototype that brings Receta’s vision to life. The interface draws inspiration from retro cookbooks and warm kitchen tones to create a sense of nostalgia and comfort.Users can import recipes, track progress, and personalize their cookbooks through intuitive navigation and visual cues that make learning to cook feel rewarding rather than intimidating.
Reflection
What I learned as a design leader:
1. Process over perfection - Goal-Directed Design helped me prioritize user goals over visual polish.
2. Empathy drives clarity - Listening to users’ real frustrations shaped design decisions and priorities.
3. Collaboration builds better ideas - Working within a team environment strengthened my communication and leadership skills.
4. Joy matters - Designing for beginners reminded me that empathy and playfulness are just as important as usability.
