Role
Product strategy, user research, instructional design, interaction design, and Adobe XD prototyping.
Project · Capstone (Harvard ALM) · Spring 2019
Cooking from Scratch
A research-driven concept for helping self-directed cooks build knowledge across recipes, experiments, and time.
Cooking knowledge accumulates informally: through recipes, videos, trial and error, and advice remembered from someone else’s kitchen. The challenge is retaining that experience and building on it later.
For my Harvard Extension School ALM capstone in Digital Media Design, I combined UX research, instructional design, and interaction design to explore a self-directed learning system for cooking. The result was a designed and evaluated concept, not a developed or launched product.
User ResearchInstructional DesignInteraction DesignProduct DesignLearning Systems
Status
Graduate capstone concept; not developed or launched.
Research
7 exploratory interviews, static-wireframe feedback with 9 participants, interactive-prototype feedback with 4 returning participants, 12–13 research articles, and an 8-product competitive review.
Outcome
Three core product areas and an eight-frame interactive prototype of the “I Want to Learn” flow.
The problem
Most cooks have nowhere to put what they’ve learned
The goal isn’t to cook more recipes. It’s to reach fluency: the feeling of competence and confidence that comes from accumulated, organized experience. Most people working toward that aren’t following a curriculum. They’re picking things up from YouTube, recipes, trial and error, things a parent showed them once. The knowledge is scattered across memory, scraps of paper, bookmarked recipes, mental notes that fade. There’s no way to track what you’ve tried, what you’ve learned, what you want to learn next, or why something went wrong last time.
Cooking from Scratch is a tool that puts skill development in the user’s hands: track what you’re learning, log what you’ve cooked, and organize your knowledge in a way that actually accumulates over time.
Research approach
Grounded in theory from the start
Before soliciting feedback from potential users, I read 12–13 journal articles on cooking education and instructional design, reviewed coursework from my Introduction to Instructional Design course, and conducted a competitive review of 8 products. That foundation shaped both the research questions and the design direction from the first wireframe.
Literature review
What does research say about how adults learn cooking skills? What instructional design frameworks apply?
12–13 articles
Competitive review
What cooking tools and learning platforms exist? Where are the gaps?
8 products
Exploratory interviews
What does cooking skill development actually look like in practice? What are users’ goals, pain points, and mental models?
N=7
Static-wireframe feedback
Could participants understand the purpose and content model of three proposed product areas from isolated screens?
N=9
Interactive-prototype feedback
Did a contextual, eight-frame “I Want to Learn” simulation communicate the feature more clearly, and what still felt missing?
N=4 returning
Exploratory interviews
What the interviews surfaced
Seven interviews explored how people approached cooking, organized what they learned, and tried to improve. The synthesis showed that cookingknowledge was accumulated informally across experience, memory, recipes, and personal notes. People struggled to retain what they had tried, learned, or intended to revisit, while skill development unfolded over time rather than through a prescribed curriculum.
Instructional design applied
Defining the learning system
A key goal of this project was applying what I’d learned in my Introduction to Instructional Design course to UX design. These three concepts from instructional design theory directly influenced the product’s structure and the choices made about what the app does and doesn’t do for the user.
Heutagogy
Self-determined learning: the learner sets their own goals, pace, and path.
Applied: The app doesn’t prescribe a curriculum. Users define what they want to learn and what progress means to them. The system organizes and surfaces their own knowledge. It doesn’t supply it.
Backwards design
Start with the desired result, then determine what evidence would show you’ve reached it, then design the learning experience.
Applied: The “I Want to Learn” screen starts with the goal (a skill the user wants to develop), then surfaces relevant logged experience and resources, working backward from outcome to content.
Andragogy
Adults learn differently from children: they’re self-directed, motivated by relevance, and draw on existing experience.
Applied: The Food Log captures what users have already done, not just what a course tells them to do next. It treats prior experience as the foundation, not a blank slate.
Competitive review
Eight products, no close match in the 2019 review
I reviewed products across two categories: cooking-specific tools (instruction and recipe management) and general-purpose organization tools that people could theoretically adapt for cooking. The review foundno close match among the eight products reviewed: none treated skill development as the primary use case. Product details reflect the 2019 review and may have changed since.
| Product | Category | Gap relative to Cooking from Scratch |
|---|---|---|
| Allrecipes Cooking School | Cooking instruction | Curriculum-driven; no user-defined skill goals or personal logging |
| America’s Test Kitchen Online | Cooking instruction | Expert-led content; no mechanism for tracking your own skill development |
| Rouxbe | Cooking instruction | Professional culinary curriculum; structured, linear, not self-directed |
| Foodist Kitchen | Cooking instruction | Habit-focused; no long-term skill tracking or knowledge organization |
| Paprika Recipe Manager | Recipe management | Organizes recipes; no skill layer, no logging, no learning goals |
| NYT Cooking | Recipe media | Editorial content; saving recipes is not the same as tracking skill development |
| Evernote | General organization | Could be adapted, but no cooking-specific structure or skill framework |
| Airtable | General organization | Powerful but requires significant setup; not accessible to most users |
Testing three product areas
Three hypotheses about how experience could accumulate
I wireframed three proposed product areas in Adobe XD. “I Want to Learn” would preserve self-defined goals and questions. The Food Log would record experiments and reflection. Home would keep accumulated knowledge visible and retrievable. At this stage, each screen was a hypothesis to test.
Wireframes · 3 screens
1 / 3
“I Want to Learn…”: user-defined skill goals. Knife skills appeared repeatedly in the exploratory research. Directly applies backwards design: start with the goal, then surface relevant content.
Selected wireframe feedback:
“I guess I was confused at first when looking at the mockup — I wasn’t sure if the content was user-created or app-created.”Wireframe feedback participant
“I would like to see how the recipes on my main page relate to the skills I am trying to develop.”Wireframe feedback participant, on the Home screen
The decisive finding
The static wireframe failed to explain the core feature
Only 1 of 9 participants accurately described what “I Want to Learn” did from the isolated static screen. The screen did not provide enough context for participants to tell whether the system supplied instruction or whether the cook created and organized the content. Because self-directed skill development was central to the concept, this was not a visual-polish problem. The feature needed to explain itself through use.
Contextual interactive redesign
Turning an isolated screen into an eight-frame learning flow
I redesigned the feature as an interactive Adobe XD simulation. Itintroduced the purpose before data entry, began with a concrete goal of learning to make French baguettes, and sequenced the cook’s goal, motivation, questions, and notes. Later frames demonstrated that saved questions and notes remained visible and findable rather than disappearing into another disconnected list.
Prototype flow · 8 frames
1 / 8
Applying backwards design: the user starts by naming their goal before the app asks anything else.
Interactive eight-frame simulation of the “I Want to Learn” flow · built for the second design-feedback round
What the second round established
Clearer reception, plus the next unmet need
Four participants from the earlier feedback group reviewed the interactive simulation through a prototype-linked survey. They described the revised flow as concise and easy to navigate, and one participant said it increased their confidence to pursue more cooking challenges. Requests for photos and video suggested useful supporting media.
“That was concise. It was easy to navigate.”Interactive-prototype feedback participant
“The questions and content on the site gave me the confidence to pursue more cooking challenges.”Interactive-prototype feedback participant
“Will there be a video section of someone showing us how to make the baguettes and photos of recommended ingredients?”Interactive-prototype feedback participant
The consequential unresolved need was progress over time. One participant described cooking skills as work revisited across months or years and wanted a way to remember where they had left off. The revised flow communicated the concept more clearly, but longitudinal progress tracking remained a next design problem—not a completed feature.
What this demonstrates
Four decisions that shaped the concept
01
Design around how people actually learn
Interviews reflected that cooking knowledge accumulated through experience, memory, recipes, and personal notes. That finding led to a Food Log for recording what changed, what happened, and what to remember next time.
02
Let cooks define what they want to learn
Instead of imposing a curriculum, “I Want to Learn” began with the cook’s own goal, motivation, questions, and notes.
03
Redesign when the evidence shows a concept is unclear
Only 1 of 9 participants understood “I Want to Learn” from the static wireframe. I responded by designing an eight-frame interactive flow that explained the feature through use.
04
Distinguish what improved from what remained unresolved
Four returning participants found the revised flow clearer and easier to navigate. They also surfaced a larger unmet need: tracking progress across cooking attempts separated by weeks, months, or years.
Related work
Work
Liberty Mutual Insurance
Enterprise intranet information architecture (IA), user research, and interaction design for 45,000+ employees across global markets.
2016 – 2022
Project · Hackathon
GachaBot
A 48-hour Kyoto hackathon concept combining tourist intercepts, contextual recommendations, and a physical prototype designed for spontaneous discovery.
2018
Project
/aɪ.pi.eɪ/ (IPA) Drill
A multilingual recall tool for learning IPA that lets the learner—not the app—decide what they know.
2026