Chefscue
Turning Leftovers Into Something Worth Cooking
Every household has that moment: standing in front of an open fridge, tired after work, staring at half an onion, some wilting spinach, and a jar of something unidentifiable. For this project, my team set out to solve exactly that problem. What started as a broad idea about cooking soon became something much more focused: helping people figure out what to make with what they already have, before it goes to waste. Enter Chefscue!
Project Duration:
2 week Sprint
Scope:
UX Research - UI design - UX design
Project members:
2
Tools:
Figma, Claude Ai, Gemini, Figjam AI
Doing the Research
We began with research. AI tools are already popular for recipe inspiration, and millennials between 25 and 34 are the biggest users of recipe apps. But the real insight came from choice itself: people want to decide what to cook in under 30 seconds. That single number became our north star for solving decision fatigue.
“I feel really guilty about wasting food.” - “We’ll eat according to what we have” - “I first check what I have in the refrigerator to avoid any unnecessary spending”
A survey and a round of interviews sharpened the picture further. Most people plan meals around what is already at home, not what looks exciting in a cookbook. Vegetables were the most commonly wasted food, and most people wanted to spend no more than five to fifteen minutes cooking. Quick and easy beat new and interesting almost every time. We ran an affinity diagram to cluster our interview findings, and it became clear our first user journey map had drifted toward a meal-prep app. We pulled it back to the real problem: what to do with that one random ingredient before it spoils.
Ideation and creating
something new
From there, ideation took shape around three ideas: an ingredient inventory, an experience that takes five minutes or less, and a system where users answer just a couple of quick questions, mood, time available, and ingredients to use, and get one clear recommendation instead of a long list to sort through. A MoSCoW exercise helped us prioritize: ingredient input and a dashboard as must-haves, gamification as a could-have, recipe saving as a should-have, and tedious manual listing as a definite won’t-have.
Midfi & Concept Testing
Mid-fidelity design brought its own small lessons, including a long deliberation over a single dropdown menu that taught me why components matter more than they seem to at first.
Concept testing on the low-fi prototype gave us three useful pivots: a waste tracker measured in kilograms instead of a percentage, since people connected with the actual weight far more; a post-cooking pop-up asking “Did you use all the ingredients?” for quick feedback; and a Recently Viewed section so recipes people forgot to save wouldn’t disappear.
An exercice on technical figma skills
Creating components is easy, all you need to do is click right and “create component” the challenge was making the prototype actually work. after many attempts in creating and recreating dropdown menus, accordeons, understanding why they bugged at certain moments was difficcult and time consuming but definitely worth it because if they were to hand out trophies in dropdown menu creations, I would for sure win one of those!
High fi & Branding
For branding, we looked at six competitor apps and noticed nearly all of them leaned on orange, yellow, and standard sans-serif type. We chose green as our primary color with orange and yellow as playful accents, paired a handwritten headline font with a clean sans-serif body, and landed on an identity that felt fun, conscious, and a little different from the rest of the category.
Conclusion
Chefscue began as a simple question, what do we cook with what’s already in the fridge, and became a project that taught me to listen closely to what people actually said, not what we assumed. Every pivot, from reshaping the journey map to swapping a percentage for kilograms, came from that discipline. Designing for a small, everyday frustration reminded me that good UX often lives in the mundane moments we overlook.
