Client
Nourish LLC
Role
Lead UX/UI Designer
Duration
6 months
Year
2022
Executive Summary
Served as the sole designer across a 6-month engagement, owning the full design process from research through handoff. Collaborated directly with founders, developers, and stakeholders to align on product direction and translate user insights into buildable solutions.
Nourish is a recipe discovery and meal planning app built specifically for people managing dietary restrictions — from gluten intolerance and veganism to complex multi-condition needs. The goal was to make healthy, restriction-aware cooking feel inspiring rather than limiting.
DESIGNING FOR DIFFERENCE
People with dietary restrictions spend a disproportionate amount of time filtering out irrelevant recipes, reading ingredient lists for hidden allergens, and cobbling together meal plans from multiple sources. Existing apps treated dietary needs as an afterthought. The challenge was building a product where dietary identity is the foundation, not a footnote.
DESIGN JOURNEY
Discovery & Research
Conducted 12 in-depth interviews across restriction profiles — celiac, nut allergies, veganism, and multi-condition users. The expected finding was that friction was primarily at the filtering stage. What we actually found was that the emotional experience was the bigger barrier — users described existing apps as making them feel like problems to be solved rather than people to be fed. That reframe became the foundation for every design decision that followed.
Define & Synthesize
Built three primary personas representing different restriction profiles and motivation levels. Mapped the full meal planning journey to expose the highest-friction moments: finding safe recipes, substituting ingredients, and shopping with confidence. Defined the design principle: restriction-aware by default.
Ideate & Prototype
Ran multiple design sprints for different user flows from onboarding to restriction input and ingredient substitution. Prototyped each of these user actions to identify multiple approaches for testing.
Test & Refine
Conducted multiple rounds of usability testing across 12 participants, identifying pain points across key flows and iterating until each met our usability benchmarks. A critical finding: users were abandoning onboarding before reaching the restriction setup step. Restructuring onboarding to lead with restriction profiles — reframed around the user benefit — reduced abandonment by more than 50% in subsequent rounds.
COOKING MADE PERSONAL
A mobile app centered on a personalized restriction profile that intelligently filters and surfaces recipes across a curated content library. Smart ingredient substitution suggestions appear inline within recipes. A weekly meal planner auto-generates shopping lists with restriction-verified alternatives highlighted. The visual design uses warm, food-forward imagery balanced with a clean, legible UI that makes scanning fast and enjoyable.
THE RESULTS
Explore More Work
Back to Projects