2022
SuChef
UX/UI, Product Design, Product Management
Intern
SuChef is a food-oriented social media platform that creates a better cooking experience for users while also paying chefs more than can be made on traditional platforms. Users pay a monthly fee and have access to high quality, step-by-step recipes from top creators around the world. I joined SuChef in March 2022 as a product design intern. With the company, I designed all user facing interfaces from initial conception to final product. Today, anytime a user logs into the web app in search of new recipes to cook, they’ll be looking at a screen that I designed from lo-fi to final product.
The scope of this project was massive. SuChef’s platform is split into two interfaces: the home cook interface and the chef interface. I worked on the home cook interface, which, in this instance, means the interface that typical users log into (think of Youtube’s typical user interface versus the interface that content creators look at). The end goal of all user interactions with the site is to either have the user cook a recipe or sign up for an event on the platform.
01
Pop-like feel to make the platform accessable to different levels of technological familiarity
02
Warm color pallets to encourage excitement and hunger
03
Intuitive interactions with minimal moving parts
As I do with all of my projects, before initial development, I developed the user flow. The goal of SuChef's platform is to get users to cook recipes and register for events, so all of the platform's basic flows lead to these outcomes. As these two actions are the events that most directly lead to revenue generation, my job was to direct users to their desired recipes as quickly and efficiently as possible.
From the homepage, users have the ability to directly access a "featured" recipe (chosen by the SuChef team and displayed on all users' devices). Alternatively, they can select an auto-selected recipe designed to fit their own preferences, or choose a recipe from a recent upload from a creator they follow. This maximizes the chances of boosting user engagement and encourages home cooks to continue using the platform.
Defining the look and feel of SuChef was vital to the project's success. We needed consistent styles and typography across an entire platform, with an ideal goal of both creator and users interacting with similar or identical typography and color. My team and I developed a style system that utilized light and elegant typography and warm colors, which were chosen to stimulate hunger and invoke a culinary atmosphere.
Here are five of the cards I build, which represent recipes, creators, techniques, classes, and dinners offered through SuChef. These cards represent all the different types of searchable content. Presenting so many different kinds of information in the same size and shape format proved to be a formidable design challenge. I solved this problem through standardizing the size of text and visual elements, using an external tag to indicate the kind of content, and using specific UI elements on each type of card so users can quickly identify what they're looking at without going farther into the page.
Easily differentiating types of content was vital. To solve this, I developed two general formats of cards: activity cards and informational cards. I designed activity cards for recipes and techniques, which are the "doing" items on the platform. These feature less text, but also include items like difficulty and time. Informational cards, the other type, are for less immediate activities such as events and creator pages. These have more pure text and (often) a date.
To date, the web app is a smoothly functioning, beautiful program that successfully delivers users pleasurable experiences and an accessible, intuitive UI. The vast majority of the platform’s user interactions are with my designs. I personally developed 24 unique screens and 4 functionalities, combining both product design and PM into one project. To see more of my work and check out the final product, scroll below.
