Tendr: Designing a Recipe Discovery App for Decision-Fatigue

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Young adults today have unlimited access to recipes — TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, food blogs — yet "I don't know what to make" remains one of the most common daily frustrations. The problem isn't a lack of content. It's decision fatigue: too many choices, none of them feeling right given what's in the fridge, how much time you have, or what you're in the mood for.

We set out to design a recipe discovery experience that felt less like searching a database and more like the effortless scroll of a social feed — but one that actually ended with dinner on the table.

The How Might We question

How might we help young adults discover recipes they'll actually want to cook by making selection feel fun, quick, and personalized — while accounting for their budget, time, dietary needs, and skill level?

Intrapreneurship: reviving a failed concept, not starting from scratch

Rather than building a new app from nothing, we took an intrapreneurial approach — positioning the project as if we had acquired Tender, an original swipe-based food app that generated press attention before shutting down. We analyzed why it failed, then redesigned it from the ground up as Tendr: new brand, new UI, new feature set, informed by what the original got wrong.

Why Tender failed

- Clunky UI 

- Swipe mechanics didn't work reliably

-Broken filter functionality

-No personalization or pantry awareness

-No clear path from inspiration to action

What Tendr fixes

- Research-backed swipe interaction design

- AI-powered ingredient-based recommendations

- Budget, time, and skill-level filters

- Social-media-inspired UI that bridges inspiration and cooking

I led the research requirements and constraints synthesis for the project. We conducted 7 in-depth user interviews alongside secondary market research — and the data pointed to the same core insight across every participant.

7/7

Participants check their fridge or pantry before deciding what to cook

6/7

Said time constraints significantly affect their recipe choices

5/7

Use social media as their primary recipe discovery source

Key Quotes:

"Deciding what to make is so much harder than actually making it."

User interview participant

"Snap a pic of what you currently have, boom — recipes."

User interview participant

"There's a lot of repetitive recipes if you're stuck in a certain budget."

Jaime, user interview

Research findings directly shaped the Figma prototype — a swipe-based recipe discovery experience with pantry-aware AI recommendations, time and budget filters, and a social-media-inspired card interface. Once the prototype was built, we ran structured usability tests to validate the core interaction.

Key usability finding

Testing revealed that users weren't intuitively discovering the swipe mechanic — the prototype instructed scrolling, not swiping, leaving participants searching for how to interact. One tester took over 2 minutes to complete their first swipe. This gave us a clear, actionable design fix: the onboarding experience needed to explicitly surface the core gesture.

1

Competitive analysis

Benchmarked existing recipe apps and social platforms to identify gaps — what they got right, where they fell short, and where Tendr had a genuine opportunity.

2

User interviews (7 participants)

Conducted qualitative interviews to understand mental models around cooking decisions, pain points with existing tools, and what would make a recipe app genuinely useful vs. just another scroll.

3

Requirements & constraints synthesis

Translated research findings into validated feature requirements and explicit constraints — what Tendr must have, and what it must avoid (informed by Tender's failure modes).

Figma prototype

Designed high-fidelity mockups covering the core swipe-to-discover flow, pantry management, AI assistant, and cookbook mode.

5

Usability testing & iteration

Ran structured think-aloud tests with multiple participants, collecting both quantitative metrics (learnability, error counts, ease-of-use ratings) and qualitative insights. Used findings to identify critical design improvements.

- Validating an assumption and acting on it are different skills. Every interview confirmed the same insight — but translating that into a design constraint that the team actually built around required pushing the research findings into every design decision, not just the presentation deck.

- Usability testing is humbling in the best way. Watching a real user spend two minutes trying to figure out a swipe interaction you designed made it immediately clear where the prototype failed — no amount of internal review would have caught that.

- Reframing an existing failure is a real product skill. The intrapreneurial angle — understanding why Tender failed before designing Tendr — changed how the whole team thought about the problem. We weren't just building a feature list; we were building against a documented set of mistakes.

- The gap between saving a recipe and cooking it is where most apps fail. Every design decision was evaluated against whether it actually helped someone get from "I found something" to "I'm cooking it."