End-to-End App

Cookbook Club: Bringing people together, one recipe at a time

From scattered recipes to shared dinners. Cookbook Club is a mobile app designed to help members discover recipes, plan dinner, and share the experience, without the chaos of group chats and scattered screenshots.

Role
Solo UX/UI Designer
Type
End-to-end app (0→1)
Platform
Mobile app
Scope
Research → UI kit & brand
Two Cookbook Club screens: the home screen with the next club meeting and the dish you have claimed, and the Clubs screen listing your clubs alongside clubs to discover.

Overview

Dinner parties are fun. Organizing it isn't.

Cooking and sharing dishes with friends should be joyful, but the logistics get in the way. There's no central place for recipes (not everyone has access to the same cookbooks), coordinating a meetup can get hectic, and it isn't always clear how to take part. Research surfaced a telling pattern: most people just fall back on group texts. I designed a structured-but-approachable experience with clear club workflows, intuitive recipe browsing, and guided meeting setup with minimal friction from the first tap to the dinner table.

01

Two personas, one fragmented experience

Each captured one side of every cookbook club, and a shared set of frustrations:

Jefferson persona card. Age 29, Marketing Manager. Goals: organize cookbook club gatherings, discover new recipes, make planning collaborative and fun, and ensure everyone participates. Behaviors: coordinates dinners over group chats, saves recipes in notes and social bookmarks, plans events in Google Calendar, and often volunteers to host. Frustrations: recipes scattered across apps, group chats hard to track, and unclear who is actually committing. Needs and opportunities: a central place to vote on recipes, clear cooking assignments, shared event planning, and reminders for upcoming meetings.
Jefferson (29), Marketing Manager. The host who organizes gatherings and needs one place to assign dishes and plan events.
Susan persona card. Age 34, Software Engineer. Goals: discover interesting recipes to experiment with, improve cooking skills, try recipes recommended by friends, and connect over unique dishes. Behaviors: searches with YouTube, ChatGPT, and food blogs, saves recipes in notes or browser bookmarks, and watches short cooking videos before trying new recipes. Frustrations: hard to organize recipes across platforms, difficulty finding a saved recipe later, and planning the right quantity for different group sizes. Needs and opportunities: a structured recipe library with filters and search, one place to keep saved recipes, and an easy way to share with friends.
Susan (34), Software Engineer. The hobbyist cook who needs a structured, searchable recipe library that's easy to share.
Research · Affinity map Cookbook Club affinity map: color-coded sticky notes grouped into seven columns covering goals and motivations, cooking habits, pain points, social and community needs, content preferences, technology and app expectations, and digital tools and workarounds.
Seven themes came out of the interviews. These four shaped the product:
  • The social pull: goals and community needs both pointed to cooking together for the people, not just the food.
  • The scatter problem: recipes lived across notes apps, screenshots, and social media, with no shared home.
  • The coordination gap: planning leaned on group texts and calendars, the workaround I set out to replace.
  • The structure paradox: people wanted to know who was bringing what, but not to be told what to bring. Light themes were welcome, rigid assignments were not, and more than one person worried it could turn competitive.
02

Where users and the business align

User goals

  • Browse recipes from a cookbook
  • Coordinate who brings which dish
  • Plan dinners collaboratively
  • Save recipes in one place

Business goals

  • Centralize dinner planning
  • Reduce reliance on group chats
  • Grow via invites & shared events
  • Drive repeat usage

Technical

  • Real-time updates on dish claims
  • Prevent duplicate selections
  • Recipe import & reminders

Key decision

A social cooking app, not another recipe organizer

The easier, more familiar path was a personal recipe organizer. I prioritized club creation and shared planning instead, so the product's core is cooking together, not just saving recipes. The recipe library stays in service of the social experience rather than being the whole point.

03

Structured the whole product

I organized the app around five clear areas so key actions stayed discoverable as it grew.

Home

  • Upcoming dinners
  • Recent recipes
  • Club activity

Recipes

  • Recipe library
  • Discover cookbooks
  • Saved & favorites
  • Add recipe

Events

  • Upcoming
  • Claimed dishes
  • Grocery list
  • Plan new

Clubs

  • Members
  • Club feed
  • Invite
  • Photos

Profile

  • Account
  • Cooking prefs
  • Previous recipes
  • Settings
Sitemap Cookbook Club sitemap. The app branches from onboarding into sign up or log in, join an existing club, or create a club, then into two main hubs: Events (upcoming, event details, recipes for the event, claimed dishes, grocery list, event chat, and plan new) and Clubs (members, member profiles, dietary preferences, club feed, photos, invite members, and settings).
The full information architecture, organized so key actions stay discoverable as the app grows.
  • Three onboarding paths branch off the start: sign up, join an existing club, or create one.
  • Events carries the planning load, from upcoming dinners to the guided "plan new" setup (invite, date, location, recipes).
  • Clubs holds the community layer: members, feed, invites, and dietary preferences.
Event & RSVP flow
01 · Event detailsEvent details screen: date, time, place, the menu people are cooking from, who is coming, and the attend options.More below ↓
02 · RSVPRSVP screen: Yes, Maybe, or No in one tap, with an optional dietary-restrictions note and a Confirm RSVP button.More below ↓
03 · ConfirmedConfirmation screen: an all-set message with the event date and buttons to view the calendar or go home.
The end-to-end event flow, from viewing a dinner to confirming attendance.
  • Event details gather the essentials up top: date, time, place, and the menu people are cooking from.
  • RSVP in one tap (Yes / Maybe / No) with an optional dietary-restrictions note for the host.
  • A clear success state closes the loop and routes the member to the calendar.
04

Tested twice, let findings drive the design

Round 1 · Mid-fi

5 home cooks · moderated

  • Flows felt intuitive; few misclicks.
  • The "claimed dishes" page wasn't legible at a glance.
  • Photo upload didn't feel tied to an event.

Round 2 · Hi-fi

4 participants · prototype

  • Create-a-club jumped straight into a meeting, which felt misplaced.
  • Users wanted to see who claimed each dish.
  • No easy way back to their other clubs.

"Creating a new meeting felt like it should be the last part, or even an action that I take later."

Round 2 · Hi-fi participant

Those findings translated into direct changes: I moved meeting-creation out of the create-club flow, added member names to each claimed dish, clarified that photos post to a specific dinner, and improved navigation back to all clubs.

Structural change · Meeting extraction
Create-club flow, V1 versus V2 In V1, scheduling a meeting was a required step inside club creation. In V2, the club is created first and scheduling a meeting became an optional action launched from the club page. Before · V1 — meeting is a required step Club basicsname, photo Meetingday, format, loc Privacypublic/private Club created+ first meeting meeting setup moves into the club After · V2 — club first, meeting optional Club basicsname, photo Privacypublic/private Club pageclub is live Create Meeting + Schedule a meetingdate · time · format
In V1, scheduling a meeting was a required step inside club creation — you couldn't finish making a club without setting one up. Round-2 testing flagged it as misplaced. In V2 the club is created in two steps and goes live immediately, and scheduling a meeting became an optional action from the club page. Testers who began on the Clubs screen weren't sure how to add a meeting afterward, so the club page surfaces a clear Create Meeting + entry point.
Before → After · Clubs landing
Version 1 · First pass
First version of the Clubs landing screen: a single flat list of clubs with a Find a club near you button.

A single flat list of clubs. Your own clubs and ones you might join read as the same thing, so there's no clear sense of what's yours versus what's new.

Version 2 · Iteration
Iterated Clubs landing screen split into two sections: My Clubs at the top with activity, and Discover Clubs below with recommendations.

Split into "My Clubs" up top with live activity, and "Discover Clubs" below, recommended from your tastes.

05

Built the brand and the system

I designed a warm, approachable identity and a reusable component library so every screen felt cohesive.

Brand identity · Logo Cookbook Club logo system: serif editorial and all-caps sans wordmarks, a mark-plus-wordmark lock-up, app icons, and the five-petal community gathering mark in full color, monochrome, and two-tone.
A warm, editorial identity built around a five-petal "community gathering" mark that reads as both a flower and a star.
  • Two wordmark voices: an editorial serif for warmth and a tight all-caps sans for product confidence.
  • The mark scales down cleanly to an app icon in full color, monochrome, and dark variants.
Design system · UI kit Cookbook Club UI kit: color palette (coral, accent green, neutrals), Sora headline and Inter body type scale, and reusable components including buttons, tags, club cards, recipe containers, member groups, and the main navigation.
A reusable component library, color, type, buttons, cards, tags, and navigation, so every screen stays cohesive.
  • Coral primary with a green accent for confirmations, on warm neutral surfaces.
  • Sora for headlines, Inter for body and UI, with weights mapped to emphasis, labels, and metadata.
  • Components are built once and reused: club cards, recipe containers, member stacks, and the tab bar.
Invited member onboarding flow
How a brand-new member goes from an invite link to a populated home, the moment that turns a group text into the app.
01
Invitation
Receives an invite to join a specific club.
Invitation screen: Joyce Le invited you to join Sunday Supper Club, with Accept and create account or I already have an account.
02
Sign up
Creates an account to accept the invite.
Create your account screen with name, email, password, and location fields, and a Sign up and join club button.
03
Account setup
Adds name and cooking and dietary preferences.
What do you like to cook screen: selectable cuisine and cooking interest chips with a Continue button.
04
Confirmation
Confirms the account and club membership.
Confirmation screen: You are in, with the joined club card showing the next meeting and the member interests.
05
Home (new user)
Lands on a populated home, ready for the first dinner.
New-user home screen: a greeting, the next meeting card, a claim-a-recipe card, the member club, and clubs to discover nearby.
06

Outcome

The result

A user-centered platform that makes discovering cookbooks, coordinating dinners, and engaging with a community feel simple: a structured, welcoming alternative to the group chat people were settling for, with reusable components and a brand that's distinctly its own.

"It's like meetup.com meets a recipe app."

Usability test participant
▶ Open the interactive prototype Figma ↗
© 2026 Leah Shim · Carefully crafted, occasionally overthought
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