Cooking from Scratch

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 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.

Exploratory interviews

What the interviews surfaced

Seven interviews explored how people currently develop cooking skills, what they track, and what they wished existed. The consistent finding: people accumulate cooking knowledge in scattered places — notes, memory, bookmarked recipes — with no way to build on it over time or find it when they need it.

Instructional design applied

Three frameworks that shaped the design

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.

Competitive review

Eight products, no close competitors

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 found no product that treated skill development as the primary use case. (Completed in 2019; product details may be outdated.)

Designs

Three wireframed screens, one prototyped flow

I wireframed three screens that represented the core of the product, then built a higher-fidelity prototype of the “I Want to Learn” flow for the second feedback round. Screens were designed in Adobe XD.

Wireframes · 3 screens

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1 / 3

“I Want to Learn…”: user-defined skill goals. 5 of 7 interviewees mentioned wanting to learn knife skills. Directly applies backwards design: start with the goal, then surface relevant content.

Selected wireframe feedback:

Prototype flow · 8 frames

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1 / 8

Applying backwards design: the user starts by naming their goal before the app asks anything else.

Higher-fidelity prototype of the “I Want to Learn” flow · built for the second round of user feedback

Selected prototype feedback:

Where this goes next

Revisiting the design in 2026 with AI design tools

The 2019 thesis put the learner in charge of their own path (heutagogy: self-determined learning), offering structure without removing that authorship. In May 2026 I used the project to try three AI design tools (Claude Design, ChatGPT Canvas, Google Stitch), redesigning the “I want to learn” screen with two prompts: one that supplied my original 2019 screen, one that supplied only the product goals, no imagery.

ChatGPT Canvas · 2019 screen supplied as reference

ChatGPT Canvas · product goals only, no imagery supplied

What this demonstrates

Research-driven design, applied theory, and a novel problem space