I conducted a survey of a group of home cooks to understand their approaches to cooking. I set out to validate my assumptions about how tumultuous the experience of cooking from a recipe on mobile could be. *This is a concept project for NYT Cooking and I am not personally affiliated with them. I focused on recipe formatting for active cooking as well as ideation around navigation improvements to limit interaction needed with the phone while cooking. So, taking a design thinking approach to dissecting a best-in-class home cooking app, NYT Cooking, I set out to find opportunities for improvements. It is a golden rule for cooks to follow any recipe to a T the first time around, but so much of this experience on mobile makes this initial attempt fraught with peril. My brain will instantly forget the step I just read, and as I am fumbling around with my phone to unlock it over a pan full of burning food, I scroll quickly in a panic to reread the step but can’t find where I left off. Generally, I feel like I can’t keep up with a recipe while actively cooking. My most frustrating experiences in the kitchen are usually when I am cooking from my phone. There is a lot of fussing over details when writing recipes for print publications, but surprisingly it seemed as though digital recipes were not afforded that same consideration. I experienced what was involved in professional recipe development how to take something written by a chef that might have been scaled for a restaurant and pare it down for the home cook. I had also become a baking enthusiast, and was even given a few recipes to test from our food editor. After college, I worked at an agency designing food publications where I pored over hundreds of recipes and tinkered with formatting to make them accessible to the home cook.
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