Consumer · 0→1 Product Design

MyCookBook:one home for every recipe you love

Overview

A personal recipe app, born from a love of cooking and the need to organize years of favorite recipes — store, find, and share them in one place instead of hunting across a dozen websites.

My role

UX Researcher & Product Designer.
Research, UX, UI & prototyping.

Type

Personal0→1

Platform

Mobile app

MyCookBook — mobile app

MyCookBook — a personal recipe collection that travels with you.

The problem

Years of favorite recipes — scattered across a dozen websites.

As a foodie always experimenting, I kept losing track of dishes that actually worked. Saved recipes lived everywhere and nowhere — slow to find, hard to follow, and a hassle to share with the people I cooked for.

Scattered & slow to find

A growing collection spread across platforms meant wasted time relocating a saved recipe.

Plain text, not visual

People follow recipes with step-by-step photos or video — most tools were walls of text.

Cumbersome to share

Sending a favorite dish to friends or family felt clunky and broke the cooking flow.

The approach

How I tackled it

A personal itch, validated properly — so the app solved real cooking behavior, not just mine.

User research

Interviews with home cooks to map how people actually save, find, and follow recipes day to day.

InterviewsNeeds & pains

Competitive analysis

Reviewed existing recipe apps to find what people loved, what they tolerated, and where the gaps were.

Benchmarking

Prototyping & testing

Designed, prototyped, and ran usability testing to keep the interface simple and genuinely accessible.

PrototypeUsability

Three needs kept surfacing: visual recipes, fast retrieval, and effortless sharing.

The solution

One app, three jobs done well

MyCookBook — key screens

Organize

A single recipe card holds photos, video, and rich text. Upload media, add multiple recipes, and arrange everything into the right folder.

📷 Photos🎬 Video📝 Rich text

Find fast

A clear folder structure (“Family,” “Desserts,” “Favorites”) plus search and filtering by ingredient or type — so a saved recipe is seconds away.

📁 Folders🔍 Smart search

A share button on every card sends a recipe to friends or posts to social — without ever leaving the app.

🔗 One-tap👥 Social

The impact

What it delivers

1 home

For every recipe

No more hunting across a dozen sites — everything you cook lives in one place.

Photo · video · text

Visual by default

Recipes you can actually follow, the way people really cook.

One tap

To share

Send a dish to family or post it — without leaving the app.

A self-initiated 0→1 concept, shaped by interviews with home cooks and competitive analysis — a personal project, not a shipped product.

Lessons learned / next steps

Building MyCookBook taught me to set clear boundaries while simplifying — managing recipes, multimedia, and sharing all surfaced trade-offs early. The takeaway: detailed, early scope keeps a 0→1 product on time, and research lets you balance flexibility with the original vision.

Keep exploring