Lets Cook

About Get Cooking

What inspired us

This started with a real moment. One of us was trying to hit his macros for the day, stared at his fridge full of random ingredients, and had no clue what to make. He looked up recipes, wung it with the spices, and ended up with dry chicken that didn't hit his numbers anyway. We realized this happens to almost everyone. You have food. You have goals. You still mess it up. Existing cooking apps hand you a recipe and walk away. Nobody is actually helping you cook.

What we learned

The biggest thing we learned is that cooking isn't a recipe problem. It's a guidance problem. Our user testing with 15 people showed that 12 out of 15 named the live check-in moments as the best part of the app. The recipe itself was almost secondary. What people actually wanted was someone standing next to them at the stove making sure they didn't mess it up. That reframed how we thought about every screen.

We also learned that scope discipline matters. We cut features we loved (live camera vision, multiple onboarding flows) to keep the core story tight. A focused prototype beats a crowded one every time.

How we built it

We scoped to 10 hero screens that told one complete story: open the app, find a recipe, cook it with live guidance, share the result. We built a shared component library in Figma first so every screen felt consistent, then split the screens across the team and stitched them together. From low-fi to mid-fi to hi-fi we kept the same 10 to 15 screens and just raised fidelity each pass. We ran user testing on the mid-fi prototype through a Google Form, then iterated based on the results.

Challenges we faced

The hardest part was resisting the urge to add features. Every time a teammate had a new idea, we had to ask if it served the hero story or distracted from it. Our second challenge was the Let's Cook entry screen. User testing showed beginners got overwhelmed by the four paths, which forced us to rethink the flow and plan a simpler default for v2.

The last challenge was designing for two very different users at once. Macro-tracking gym users want auto-logging and efficiency. Beginners want patience and hand-holding. Balancing both without making the app feel generic took multiple rounds of revision.

Built With

• figma