Digest

In today's health-conscious world, individuals are increasingly mindful of their diets, especially those navigating gut health issues such as IBS or food intolerances. Having experienced these challenges myself, I identified a gap in the market for a recipe app that truly caters to those with dietary sensitivities.

This project was born from personal frustration and a desire to create a tool that empowers users to discover and plan meals aligned with their dietary needs — without sacrificing ease, enjoyment, or flavour.

Create an app that helps users discover, plan, and prepare meals tailored to their specific food intolerances and dietary preferences.

• Streamline recipe discovery for those with gut issues
• Personalise based on user dietary profiles (e.g. intolerance to dairy, gluten)
• Enable easy filtering, clear cooking steps, and intuitive meal planning

I mapped user problems, value propositions, channels, and goals on a user-centered business canvas in Miro, created provisional personas (e.g. IBS sufferer, nutrition-conscious parent), and ran a competitor analysis of apps like Yummly, Whisk, and Mealime — identifying gaps around intolerance filtering, ingredient substitution, and UI clarity.

A user survey surfaced key findings:

• Users want quick, simple recipes with minimal ingredients
• They prefer apps that help them avoid frequent shopping trips
• The ability to remove disliked or intolerant ingredients is crucial
• Users want personalisation, images, clear prep/cook times, and shopping lists

I mapped the app's information architecture around intuitive flows for discovery, filtering, and cooking, then sketched and digitised low-fidelity wireframes covering onboarding, recipe search, recipe detail, and saved collections. An interactive prototype was tested with target users, and I iterated on confusing flows (e.g. refining how intolerances are set up).

The visual design uses a clean, calming aesthetic — light colours and rounded shapes — with typography and icons chosen to aid readability and accessibility, designed mobile-first.

• Primary colours: muted greens and neutrals (health + trust)
• Typeface: sans-serif for clarity
• Components: recipe cards, intolerance tags, toggle filters

Core user stories included adding intolerances to a profile to exclude them from searches, searching by ingredient or keyword, following easy cooking instructions with images, saving favourites, and creating a shopping list from chosen recipes.

MVP features: dietary-profile onboarding, smart recipe filtering by intolerance, recipe pages with images and steps, save-to-favourites, and an optional checklist-style shopping list generator.

The final prototype demonstrates a focused, user-friendly app that streamlines meal discovery for users with food intolerances. Testing showed strong alignment with user needs — the intolerance setup felt quick and empowering, recipe cards and images enhanced trust and appeal, and navigation was intuitive and visually calming.