Kitchen Copilot

Context

The cooking app market was crowded. Every app on the Play Store did one thing well: recipe discovery was excellent here, meal planning there, shopping lists somewhere else. But no single app solved the full problem. We saw an opportunity to build something different — an app that didn’t choose between features but integrated them into a coherent experience.

Kitchen Co-pilot was designed to serve everyone: beginners looking for guidance, home cooks trying to organize their week, professionals sharpening skills. The app needed to handle cooking planning, recipe discovery and creation, ingredient management, shopping, and community. It was ambitious. We knew it would be complex.

My Role

UX/UI Designer, Design System architect, and research lead. I owned the flows, layouts, UI components, and the design system that held everything together. I also conducted the research that informed our direction. The core team stayed constant throughout: a product owner, a technical director, and me. Colleagues came and went from the broader team, but the three of us held the vision intact for the entire two years.

Process

Everything happened simultaneously. That was the challenge. Features weren’t queued; they were being designed, built, and tested in parallel. Priority wasn’t clear, which meant I felt the weight of solving every design problem at once. But I learned quickly: focus only on user experience. That was my anchor. When I stopped trying to optimize everything and instead focused on making the flows make sense, the design direction became clearer.

The core workflow started with the cooking calendar. From there, users could find recipes, extract ingredients into a shopping list, share that list with friends (with permission controls), receive notifications, and move into the social side of the app. Each system connected to the next. The simplicity of that chain masked the complexity underneath.

We built in layers. The cooking calendar linked to recipes. Recipes linked to shopping. Shopping linked to notifications. Notifications led to community. Social features allowed users to post what they cooked, challenge friends, and participate in coach-led challenges — small tasks with rewards. A huge recipe database, scraped from multiple sources, powered discovery.

Research

My technical director — one of our core stakeholders — conducted research showing what we suspected: competition was strong in every direction, but fragmented. No app owned the entire experience. We also learned early that our user base wouldn’t be uniform. We were trying to serve the full market, but we realized it would skew toward one persona: people with their hands full — housewives managing family meals, coordinating shopping, planning weeks ahead. People who needed structure but also flexibility.

That insight changed how I designed every interaction. Users would sometimes have dirty hands. Accuracy couldn’t be assumed. Some users would be older and less tech-savvy. That meant larger touch targets, clearer hierarchies, and interactions that didn’t punish mistakes.

Approach

The app went through significant visual evolution. Early on, we solved for user experience — the flows worked, the logic was sound. But after a couple of quarters, we realized the UI wasn’t catching up to the UX. The functionality was there, but it didn’t look like it was. That’s when we did the first redesign.

I chose glassmorphism as the visual direction. It felt modern without being cold. I increased touch targets deliberately — buttons got bigger, interactive areas expanded. I added more visual breathing room because I knew some users would be rushing through the app between cooking steps, others would be exploring slowly. The design had to accommodate both.

That redesign landed well. The team was happy. The direction felt right. The app kept evolving from there.

Final Design

After two years, I handed the project to a colleague — someone with fresh eyes and a different aesthetic sensibility. He raised the bar. He changed the color palette, brought more classical refinement into the visual language, and launched the version that’s live today on App Store and Play Store.

What he did confirmed something important: the foundation we built — the UX, the flows, the systems — was strong enough to support a different visual direction. Good design doesn’t break when you change the surface. His contribution proved that.

Impact

Kitchen Co-pilot is live. It’s serving users across both platforms. The app solves a real problem for real people. It’s not an enterprise tool or a corporate product. It’s something that helps someone plan their week, cook a meal, shop for ingredients, and share what they made with friends. That simplicity — that focus on common problems — is what makes it matter.

What I Learned

Navigating complexity while staying focused. I learned to prioritize ruthlessly. When everything is urgent, nothing is. I learned that user experience comes first. A beautiful UI hiding bad UX is just expensive bad design. But I also learned the inverse: when UX is solid and UI is weak, people won’t use it. Both matter, but they matter in sequence. You fix UX first. Then UI amplifies it.

Stakeholder alignment under pressure. The product owner and technical director sometimes wanted different things. My job became translating between those needs and the user’s actual needs. That’s harder than any individual design decision.

Building something real with a small team. This is the product I’m proudest of in five years of UX/UI work. Not because it’s the biggest or won the most awards, but because it solves a problem for ordinary people. It took a small team, consistent vision, and time. No shortcuts. That matters more than I expected it to.