Cuelin is a recipe app with an edge: beyond searching and saving recipes, it lets users create their own — and it can detect raw ingredients through the camera, then suggest what dishes can be made from them.
Role
UI/UX Designer
Type
Mobile app redesign
Platform
Mobile app
Standout feature
Camera ingredient detection
The problem
A good product the design wasn't keeping up with
Cuelin is a genuinely useful product. Beyond searching and saving recipes, it lets users create their own — and its standout feature can detect raw ingredients through the camera, then suggest what dishes can be made from them.
The design just wasn't keeping up with what the product could do. Features that set Cuelin apart — creating your own recipes, cooking from whatever ingredients are already in the kitchen — deserved an experience that surfaced them, instead of one where the product's best ideas stayed easy to miss.
The approach
Design around what makes Cuelin different
The redesign started from the product's strengths and worked backwards to the interface. Searching and saving recipes — the everyday core of the app — had to stay effortless. Around that core, the flows that make Cuelin Cuelin got first-class treatment.
Creating a recipe became a proper flow of its own, not an afterthought. And the camera detection was designed as a journey in three beats: point the camera at the raw ingredients you have, let the app detect them, then choose from the dishes it suggests you can make.
"It's a genuinely useful product. The design just wasn't keeping up with what it could do."
— the brief, in one sentence
Outcome
An experience that matches the product
The redesign gives Cuelin an interface that finally presents the product on its own terms: search and save when you know what you want, create when you have something of your own, and cook from what's already in front of you when you don't. The features were always there — the redesign makes sure people actually meet them.
