Dished
A mobile app that helps users discover new recipes and explore global cuisines by connecting dishes and ingredients with their cultural origins.
Timeline
Jan – Mar 2025
Team
Solo
Tools & Skills
User Research, Product Design, Prototyping
Solution
Where taste meets discovery.
Dished is a mobile app that helps users explore food on a cultural level. Seamless navigation between cuisines, dishes, and ingredients encourages the discovery of lesser-known foods by promoting those that match a user's flavour palate and diet.
Users go through an onboarding process to set dietary restrictions and preferred cuisines for a tailored experience.
Daily features and curated recommendations based on your diet and taste palate.
Each dish page provides extensive information, encouraging exploration and culinary discovery.
Find recipes using your pantry items or add what’s missing to your grocery list.
Background
“We do not know a nation until we sit at its dining table.”
(Qin, 2013, p. 35)
Every cuisine is shaped by a region’s history, geography, climate, survival struggles, and lifestyle. Thus, cross-cultural food sharing plays a key role in preserving and spreading culture. But where does this leave countries without the means to promote themselves overseas?
The Problem for Restaurants
When fewer people dine out, lesser-known cuisines are the first to be overlooked.
75%
of Canadians are eating out less often due to the rising cost of living (Wilson, 2025).
62%
of U.S. adults cook at home, and for about an hour a day (Ewoldt et al., 2025).
This disproportionately affects restaurants with lesser-known cuisines, which are often confined to immigrant enclaves in low-income neighbourhoods (Park, 2017).
The Problem for Home Cooks
Home cooks want to explore new cuisines but don’t know where to start.
Home cooks are tired of eating the same food.
Need meal variety and new foods to increase satisfaction.
But to try new foods, they need taste information and/or sufficient familiarity.
Many rely on convenience and lack the knowledge to prepare unfamiliar dishes, leading to repetitive meals that decrease satisfaction over time (Hendricks et al., 2021). However, 71% of adult home cooks want to learn more about cooking, especially ethnic dishes (Worsley et al., 2014). They simply need enough information to get started.
Pain Points
Restaurants with lesser-known cuisines struggle to attract diners.
Increased cost of living makes dining out inaccessible to many.
Cuisines associated with "refined" taste and restaurants in high-income neighbourhoods are promoted more.
People are reluctant to try new foods due to unfamiliarity and lack of information.
Home cooks are tired of eating the same food due to limited cooking knowledge.
Cooking new dishes can be daunting, especially when having to buy new ingredients.
Challenge
How can we encourage people to try new, unfamiliar cuisines?
Goals
My overall goal was to help users discover new food within their comfort level and help push local restaurants with lesser-known cuisines and/or businesses in historically overlooked communities.
Help users discover unique foods from around the world.
Connect dishes and cuisines to their cultural origins.
Increase business for restaurants and shops with lesser-known cuisines.
Adapt to the user's taste palate and diet for personalized food recommendations.
Get users comfortable trying new foods by comparing them to familiar ones.
Make global cooking more accessible by making use of existing pantry items.
Competitive Analysis
I analyzed existing food and recipe discovery platforms to identify current solutions and gaps in the market.
Taste Atlas
Rich content on dishes and their origins, but cluttered navigation, unclear social features, and a subjective rating system. The platform primarily serves users deeply interested in food culture.
SuperCook
Helps users generate recipes based on existing pantry items, offering a highly practical and intuitive experience, but with little emphasis on cultural discovery.
SideChef
Provides personalized recipes alongside grocery lists and meal planning. Its focus is on practicality (such as cost and detailed instructions) so it lacks cultural context.
NYT Cooking
A well-established recipe platform with strong organization and filtering. However, preferences are not tied to user profiles, resulting in a less personalized experience.
Design Opportunity
Existing platforms prioritize either cultural depth or practical utility, but rarely both. This creates an opportunity to help users explore global cuisines through familiar ingredients and preferences, lowering the barrier to discovery while preserving cultural context.
User Journey Map
Information Architecture
Design Iterations
The initial design used pixel art and bright colours for a retro-inspired look. Peer feedback indicated that the style felt overly playful and childish.
Next, I shifted to a monochromatic palette with a single accent colour and the removed dark borders around photos. While cleaner, the interface lacked visual interest due to excessive white space, and the large blocks of text required significant scrolling.
The final iteration adopted a more sophisticated, editorial direction with pops of colour and large, serif headings. By evoking the feel of a cookbook or food magazine, the design conveys a greater sense of authority and trust.
To improve flow, tabs and floating action buttons were introduced to reduce scrolling.