Kartik Sharma | UX & Product Design Portfolio

Overview

From ingredients to meals—powered by AI

Designing a Personalized Cooking & Nutrition Ecosystem

Designing an AI-powered cooking experience that transforms the ingredients users already have into personalized meals, weekly plans, and smarter nutrition decisions.

Role

Product Designer

Timeline

2 months

Platform

Mobile App

Key Outcome

AI-powered meal planning

My Role

Product Designer · AI-Powered Consumer Experience

For Flaverly, I designed a consumer cooking experience centered around helping people decide what to cook, how to use what they already have, and how to prepare meals more efficiently. My role covered the product experience from concept and information architecture through interaction design and visual UI.

What I owned

Product Concept — Shaped the core experience around AI-assisted meal discovery, ingredient-based recommendations, meal planning, and personalized cooking.
UX Strategy — Structured the experience to reduce the friction of deciding what to cook and turn everyday ingredients into useful meal suggestions.
AI Experience Design — Designed how users interact with AI recommendations, including ingredient scanning, personalized recipes, and contextual suggestions.
End-to-End UX — Designed flows across onboarding, ingredient discovery, recipe recommendations, meal planning, cooking, and progress tracking.
Information Architecture — Organized recipes, ingredients, meal plans, preferences, nutritional information, and recommendations into a simple consumer experience.
UI & Visual Design — Created the visual language, components, typography, illustrations, cards, and interaction patterns that give the product a friendly and approachable personality.
Personalization — Designed experiences around users' available ingredients, dietary preferences, budget, and cooking goals.
Prototyping — Created high-fidelity prototypes to explore and communicate the product experience and key interactions.

Product Concept — Shaped the core experience around AI-assisted meal discovery, ingredient-based recommendations, meal planning, and personalized cooking.
UX Strategy — Structured the experience to reduce the friction of deciding what to cook and turn everyday ingredients into useful meal suggestions.
AI Experience Design — Designed how users interact with AI recommendations, including ingredient scanning, personalized recipes, and contextual suggestions.
End-to-End UX — Designed flows across onboarding, ingredient discovery, recipe recommendations, meal planning, cooking, and progress tracking.
Information Architecture — Organized recipes, ingredients, meal plans, preferences, nutritional information, and recommendations into a simple consumer experience.
UI & Visual Design — Created the visual language, components, typography, illustrations, cards, and interaction patterns that give the product a friendly and approachable personality.
Personalization — Designed experiences around users' available ingredients, dietary preferences, budget, and cooking goals.
Prototyping — Created high-fidelity prototypes to explore and communicate the product experience and key interactions.

My focus

Turn the everyday friction of “What should I cook?” into a personalized experience that makes meal planning feel simple, useful, and enjoyable.

Scope of work

1 week

2 weeks

3 weeks

4 weeks

5 weeks

Research

Ideation

User flows

Wireframing & Design

Prototype & Testing

The Problem

We had the ingredients. We had the goals. But we still didn’t know what & how to cook.

Meal planning often becomes a daily decision-making problem. Users may know what ingredients they have, how much they want to spend, or how many calories they want to consume—but connecting all of these factors into practical meals takes time and effort.

Flaverly was designed to remove that friction by turning what users already have into personalized, achievable meal recommendations.

Start with what you already have

Set your nutrition and budget goals

Discover meals tailored to your ingredients

Plan your week without the guesswork

Research for the solution

I conducted user and competitor research to uncover challenges around meal planning, calorie tracking, and cooking habits. The insights informed opportunities for a simpler, more intuitive experience.

User Interviews

Conducted with 6 participants aged 22–35 with varying levels of cooking experience to understand their routines, challenges, and motivations.

Competitor Analysis

Reviewed meal planning, calorie tracking, and

recipe apps to identify gaps, strengths, and opportunities.

Reviewed meal planning, calorie tracking, and

recipe apps to identify gaps, strengths, and opportunities.

Surveys

Gathered quantitative insights from a broader audience to validate common behaviors and pain points around cooking and meal preparation.

Secondary Research

Studied articles and reports on home cooking habits, food waste, and nutrition tracking behaviors to support research findings.

Insight 1

Decision Fatigue

72%

Users spend too much time deciding what to cook, often leading to frustration and unhealthy choices.

Insight 2

Ingredient Waste

Many users waste groceries because they struggle to use available ingredients efficiently.

Insight 3

Inconsistent Tracking

58%

Fitness-focused users find calorie tracking and meal planning difficult to maintain consistently.

Insight 4

Cooking Motivation

68% of users said they would cook more often if meal planning felt faster and simpler.

A collection of insights gathered from

User interviews & research

The Challenge

How do you make AI-powered meal planning feel effortless?

The technology behind personalized recommendations can be complex. Users shouldn’t have to think about algorithms, nutrition calculations, or ingredient matching. They should simply tell Flaverly what they have, what they want, and let the product do the thinking.

Personalized

Recommendations should adapt to each user's ingredients, preferences, goals, and budget.

Consistent contributions with automatic tracking.

Effortless

Users should be able to go from “What should I cook?” to a useful meal in seconds.

Shared progress keeps everyone committed to the goal.

Intelligent

AI should make meaningful decisions behind the scenes without overwhelming users with complexity.

AI calculates contributions and timelines.

Motivating

The experience should make healthy, home-cooked meals feel achievable—not like another task to manage.

Save in-app or connect your preferred account.

The Solution

Transforming meal planning from a daily chore into a personalized AI-powered experience.

Flaverly brings ingredients, nutrition goals, meal discovery, and weekly planning into one connected experience. Instead of making users figure out what to cook, the product uses AI to turn their inputs into practical, personalized recommendations.

Before

After

Add / register their voice

Authenticate using their voice

Remove their voice

Demonstrate

Let users experience the accuracy and capabilities of the voice recognition engine.

Consistent contributions with automatic tracking.

Simplify

Turn technically complex voice processes into single, intuitive interactions.

Shared progress keeps everyone committed to the goal.

Extend

Go beyond a voice demo by allowing users to create their own voice-enabled chatbots.

Shared progress keeps everyone committed to the goal.

Projected Product Impact

Designing beyond the meal plan, creating measurable value for both users and the business.

Every design decision was evaluated against two outcomes: helping people make better food decisions with less effort, while creating a product users return to throughout their weekly cooking and nutrition journey.

50K+

Projected users in the first year

35%

Weekly planning engagement

+55 NPS

Projected user satisfaction

70%

Meal-plan completion

From helping users decide what to cook to becoming their everyday nutrition companion.

Design Iteration

Designing for everyday cooking, not just meal planning.

The first iteration focused on meal planning. Through exploration, I realized that the bigger problem wasn't organizing meals—it was deciding what to cook in the first place.

I evolved Flaverly from a planning tool into an AI-powered cooking companion, connecting ingredients, preferences, nutrition, and cooking into one experience.

Key Design Decisions

AI-Assisted Discovery

Replaced endless recipe browsing with personalized meal recommendations based on ingredients, preferences, goals, and time.

Helps users move from “What should I cook?” to a decision in seconds.

Fridge-First Experience

Introduced ingredient scanning as a starting point for meal discovery.

Users can begin with what they already have instead of manually building a shopping list.

Contextual Nutrition

Integrated calories and nutritional information directly into meal decisions.

Keeps healthy choices visible without turning cooking into a tracking exercise.

Guided Cooking

Turned recipes into actionable cooking experiences with clear ingredients, preparation time, and steps.

Reduces the gap between choosing a meal and actually making it.

Flexible Weekly Planning

Connected individual meals into a flexible weekly plan.

Provides structure without forcing users into a rigid schedule.

Design v1

Recipe browsing first
Manual ingredient entry
Static meal suggestions
Nutrition as separate information
Planning required upfront
Limited personalization

Design v2

AI-powered meal generation
Fridge-first discovery
Context-aware recommendations
Nutrition integrated into decisions
Flexible weekly planning
Guided cooking experience

Why this iteration

Better Decision Making

AI reduces the effort of

figuring out what to cook.

User can quickly grasp progress and what to do next.

Less Manual Input

Fridge scanning turns existing

ingredients into useful recommendations.

Member visibility and activity build trust and

encourage action.

More Personalization

Meals adapt to dietary preferences,

calories, budget, and available time.

Clear CTAs and amount chips reduce friction and

increase contributions.

Connected Experience

Ingredients, planning, cooking, and

nutrition now work as one system.

A flexible foundation ready for future features and growth.

Scalable Foundation

The new experience creates a foundation

for future AI-powered cooking features.

Cleaner, more modern interface that users do enjoy using.

An AI-First Cooking Experience

Traditional meal-planning apps make users browse recipes and decide what to cook themselves.

Flaverly shifts the experience toward AI-assisted decision making, helping users discover meals based on what they have, what they need, and how they want to eat.

Design Decision

The AI Meal Generator became a primary product interaction rather than a secondary feature.

Users can provide:

Available ingredients
Calorie target
Budget
Dietary preference
Cooking time

Feature #1

Design Decision

The Fridge Scanner allows users to capture their available ingredients instead of manually entering them one by one.

Those ingredients then become the foundation for AI-generated recommendations.

The interaction loop

Scan → Recognize → Recommend → Cook

Cook with what you already have.

One of the biggest barriers to meal planning is knowing what ingredients are already sitting in the fridge.

Flaverly turns the fridge into the starting point for meal discovery.

Feature #2

Brand Identity & Design System

Building a system that could scale with the product.

Rather than designing every screen independently, a reusable design system established the foundations for the entire product.

This case study is still a work in progress and may look best on desktop. Reach out if you'd like the full story.