Designed a community-centric app
Selected Top 10 finalist out of 313 participants nationwide
Format
48 hrs – Designathon
Collaborators
Oceana D, Quynh T
Design Challenge
Design your own digital application that fosters community and celebrates inclusivity
The prompt was broad. Instead of starting with screens, we started with a question:
What actually brings people together?
We mapped shared spaces, shared hobbies, shared identities. One theme kept resurfacing and that was food. Food shows up at every gathering, every celebration, every moment of connection across cultures.
This lead us to the question…
How might we create a recipe app that fosters community and celebrates inclusivity?
Competitive Analysis
If food brings people together.
Why don't our existing recipe apps do that?
Low engagement in existing recipe apps
Merely offering the ability to provide ratings might not create a sense of community for users.
Lesser-known cuisines are invisible
Platforms surface what's already trending in America, leaving underrepresented cuisines invisible.
There's no context or story behind the dish
Despite being labeled as "stories," there are no actual narratives related to the dish.
Solution
A recipe app built around
Feature 01
Give every dish a voice
Recipes include a dedicated story section where users share personal or cultural context on why the dish matters, when it's made, who taught it to them.
The story sits alongside the recipe, not buried beneath it.
Feature 02
Let the community talk
Instead of limiting engagement to ratings, users can respond to stories, ask questions, and share related experiences.
Discovery feels conversational, not transactional.
Feature 03
Make exploration feel like an adventure
An interactive world map that lights up each country as a user tries a recipe from that cuisine.
It turns culinary exploration into something visual and rewarding, nudging users to venture beyond their comfort zone without ever feeling pressured to.
Iterations
The exploration feature didn't start off as a map
Throughout the entire process, I did a lot of iterations. One example of that was the interactive map page.
01
First Iteration
We renamed "Community" to "Discover" to better reflect its purpose: introducing users to new cultural content, not just connecting them to existing users.
Reflection
Going in, I thought the hardest part would be the design. It wasn't.
I came out of this project a stronger collaborator than I entered it. That wasn't something I expected to learn from a recipe app.
Research over assumptions
We entered the designathon thinking we would design a smarter recipe app. Conversations with users reframed the problem entirely. Without that shift, we would've built something polished and generic.
Clear ownership improves outcomes
Midway through, we realized overlapping responsibilities were slowing us down. Once we defined who owned research, flows, and visual design, progress accelerated and decisions became sharper.