YezChef

Building a creator-driven AI platform where recipes adapt to you, groceries buy themselves, and your favorite chef cooks alongside you.

RoleUser Experience · UI Design · Prototyping

ClientYez Chef

Duration2 months

Year2024

Building a creator-driven AI platform where recipes adapt to you, groceries buy themselves, and your favorite chef cooks alongside you.

Yez Chef is an AI-powered culinary platform that transforms cooking into a personalized, interactive experience, letting foodies instantly generate recipes from text, voice, or images, cook step-by-step with AI chef agents

When I joined the Yez Chef project, the founder already had a set of rough mockups and a vision of what he wanted a way to make cooking as engaging as content streaming. The idea was exciting, but the experience needed depth, emotional connection, and functional clarity. We worked side-by-side, evolving those early sketches into a fully fleshed-out product that blends AI personalization, creator monetization, and seamless kitchen guidance into one cohesive platform.

The Challenge

Cooking content dominates the internet, but most home cooks still find the process frustrating. Recipes are buried in blog posts, personalization is nearly nonexistent, and creators, the ones producing all this amazing content, struggle to monetize it in meaningful ways.

Value Prop – Foodies

Designing a personalized, interactive, and rewarding cooking journey that turns everyday meals into unique, memorable experiences tailored to taste, lifestyle, and curiosity.

Foodies value-proposition canvas, Customer Jobs, Pains and Gains

Value Prop – Creators

Empowering culinary creators with tools, visibility, and monetization opportunities that bring their recipes out of passive feeds and into real kitchens, where they have tangible impact.

Creators value-proposition canvas, Customer Jobs, Pains and Gains

How Might We

In this phase all the ideas from research, to the CEO syncs are brought to the table in an in-house brainstorming session to get the best ideas out through some How Might We questions

Design in Action

We knew from the start that Yez Chef wasn’t just going to be a recipe app, it had to feel like your personal cooking helper and every meal is an experience. So we designed the journey from the very first tap.

It starts with you and your chef.

Yez Chef begins by learning your dietary needs, allergies, family size, and favorite cuisines to create a flavor profile just for you. Then you design your own AI chef modeled after a celebrity, fictional character, or even your grandma who remembers your tastes, suggests dishes you’ll love, and adapts in real time as you cook.

Simplified home and discovery.

Opening the app feels like walking into a vibrant food market with cooking classes, challenges, top chefs, and quick food category filters greet you instantly so your preferences are well tailored. The feed lets you watch short clips, view ingredients in-video, and jump straight into cooking or “remix” a recipe to your taste in seconds.

Food ideas to recipe in seconds.

Type, snap a photo, or speak your craving and an AI-generated recipe appears in seconds, tuned to your preferences, your pantry, and even your missing ingredients (which you can shop straight from the recipe view).

Cooking is guided, no dark moments.

When it’s time to actually cook, you can follow along with a step-by-step video or switch to voice-assisted mode so your AI chef talks you through it hands-free. Voice commands like “next” or “repeat” keep things moving without you having to smudge your phone screen with sauce-covered fingers.

Learnings & Impact

Safety isn’t optional

Helping users confidently discover recipes and restaurants without fear of allergens wasn’t just a feature, it changed how they engaged with food. This reinforced the value of designing trust into every interaction.

Accessibility multiplies reach

Voice navigation and screen reader support didn’t just tick an inclusion box, they opened the platform to entirely new audiences. Making accessibility a core design principle expands impact far beyond compliance.

Community drives retention

A space where users share tips and experiences turned a utility into a habit. People stayed not just for the recipes, but for the relationships. This confirmed that community features aren’t “nice-to-have”, they’re growth engines.

An AI sous-chef that adapts the recipe to who is cooking, what is in the fridge, and how the day went.

AI cooking apps lose users in week two because they read like search engines with a chat layer. The bet was that adapting the recipe to the cook, skill, time, taste, makes the assistant feel like a collaborator instead of a vending machine.

If it shipped, the things to watch:

Recipe completion rate in week one versus week four.
Average modifications per session. The assistant earns its keep when users tweak, not when they obey.
Shares per saved recipe. Does it become a thing you cook with someone else.

Three rounds of usability said the collaborator framing landed. The company pivoted before launch. The work is here so the thinking can be read even if the product cannot be opened.

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