Fresco
Home cooks were managing recipes in one app, grocery lists in another, and cooking steps on a third. I designed Fresco to collapse all three into one flow.
Role
Lead UX Designer
Timeline
12 Weeks
Team
3 people (1 designer, 1 PM, 1 developer)
Platform
iOS Mobile App
The Problem
In user interviews, every participant described the same pattern: find a recipe in one app, manually copy ingredients into Notes or a grocery app, then lose track of which recipe needed which ingredient while shopping. The average home cook was switching between 3 apps to get dinner on the table — and abandoning recipes mid-process because the friction got too high.
The real friction
It wasn't finding recipes — there are too many apps for that. It was the gap between "I want to cook this" and "I have everything I need to cook this." That gap required manual work every single time.
The design goal
Close that gap in one tap. Selecting a recipe should automatically build a categorised grocery list — no copying, no switching apps, no losing track of what's for which meal.
What Fresco Does
Three connected features that replace the 3-app workflow with one continuous flow.
Discover & Decide
Curated recipes based on dietary preferences and past favorites help users quickly decide what's for dinner.
Smart Shopping
Ingredients from selected recipes are instantly aggregated into a categorized, checkable grocery list.
Cook with Ease
Step-by-step cooking modes with integrated timers ensure the final dish turns out perfectly every time.
Research & Key Insight
I interviewed home cooks across different experience levels — beginners who cooked 1–2 times a week up to enthusiasts cooking daily. The single pattern that appeared in every interview: they all had a "system" that involved at least two apps and a notes document, and they all described it as annoying but unavoidable.
The insight that shaped everything: the problem wasn't recipe discovery — it was handoff. Once a user found a recipe they wanted to cook, the work of getting ingredients organised fell entirely on them. That manual step was where people gave up and ordered takeout instead.
Wireframing focused on the "Add to List" moment — making it a single tap from any recipe screen, with the list automatically categorised by grocery store section. We tested several placements before landing on a persistent floating action that stayed visible while scrolling through recipe steps.
User Flow
Mapping the journey from inspiration to dinner table.
Recipes
Favorites
List
Ingredients
Enjoy
Design Decisions & Tradeoffs
List persistence over simplicity
Early versions cleared the grocery list once a shop was marked complete. Testing showed users shop across multiple days — they needed the list to persist and update, not reset. We added a "completed items" fold rather than deletion.
Categorised by aisle, not recipe
First instinct was to group shopping list items by recipe ("For pasta carbonara: eggs, pancetta…"). Users found it inefficient in-store — they'd criss-cross the shop by dish. We switched to aisle categorisation, which users consistently preferred in testing.
Cook mode as a separate context
Cooking steps lived on the recipe page initially. Users kept accidentally navigating away mid-cook. We built a dedicated cook mode that locked the screen to the current step with a larger tap target and auto-advancing timer — a separate context entirely.
What we cut in week 8
Social sharing ("share your weekly meal plan") was in the original scope. In week 8 the developer flagged it would push the cook mode timer — which was the most-requested feature in research — past the deadline. We cut sharing for v2 and shipped cook mode on time.
What Usability Testing Showed
Participants could move from finding a recipe to having a complete, categorised grocery list without opening a second app — for the first time with any tool they'd tried.
In cook mode testing, no participant navigated away mid-recipe accidentally — a direct fix to the biggest friction point identified in the first research round.
Every participant described the aisle-categorised list as "how I'd actually use this in a shop" — the recipe-grouped version from v1 had confused all of them.
The most common unprompted comment across sessions: "I always wished recipe apps did this." That was the primary design goal — proven in testing.
Final Designs
Recipe discovery, aisle-categorised grocery list, and cook mode — the three screens that replaced a 3-app workflow.