Heirloom: the Family Cookbook

Tools

Figma

HTML&CSS

Javascript

Overview

Food is a connection, between friends, family, and culture. The problem is that many people don't know how to cook! Heirloom tackles generational distance, rising food prices, and creates genuine connection through great recipes.

Heirloom is a mobile app designed to help families preserve and share personal stories, photos, and voice recordings across generations. The goal was to create a digital space that transforms memory keeping into an emotional, interactive experience rather than a static archive.

Design Challenge:

Most memory or photo storage apps focus on functionality but lack emotional connection and narrative flow. The challenge was to design an interface that felt intimate, visually warm, and easy for all ages to navigate, including non-technical users like grandparents.

My Role

My Role: Product Designer & UX Researcher

I led the full design process with 5 other designers for Heirloom from initial research and concept ideation to prototyping and user testing. My focus was on crafting a visually cohesive, emotionally engaging experience that made storytelling intuitive for users of all ages.

Core Contributions:

Spearheaded user research, designing and conducting interviews and surveys to identify user needs and emotional touchpoints.
Translated findings into user personas, journey maps, and information architecture that shaped the app’s narrative flow.
Designed low and high-fidelity prototypes in Figma, incorporating visual storytelling principles and accessibility standards.
Facilitated usability testing sessions, analyzed feedback, and implemented iterative design improvements.
Collaborated with peers on UI direction and content strategy, ensuring visual consistency and clear emotional tone.

Impact:
My design decisions elevated Heirloom from a simple archive tool to a platform for intergenerational storytelling.

85%

User satisfaction

Intuitive & Easy

According to New Users

Problem

The Problem

Preserving family stories through design

Families often lose personal stories as generations pass because existing platforms focus on file storage, not emotional connection. Heirloom aims to reintroduce warmth, meaning, and memory through storytelling design, helping users preserve their family legacies in a way that feels personal, emotional, and accessible to all generations.

Research

Research Overview

Understanding users and their recipes

Objective:

The research phase aimed to uncover how families preserve, share, and emotionally connect with their stories and recipes. Understanding these habits and frustrations was key to designing a product that not only functions as a storage tool, but also preserves the emotional essence of storytelling.

Methods:
To gain a well-rounded understanding of user behavior, I used a mixed-methods approach that combined both qualitative and quantitative insights.

Online Survey
- 23 participants
- Age Range: 19–54 years old
- Cooking Frequency:
  - 70% cook 3–5 times per week
  - 30% cook daily
- Primary Motivations: Nostalgia, connection, and efficiency in preserving family traditions
1:1 Interviews - 10 participants
Competitive Analysis

“Cooking family recipes is less about the food, it’s about keeping my memories alive.” - Interview Participant, Age 29

Persona Development

After synthesizing data from both surveys and interviews, I consolidated the findings into a representative user persona named Jun Kim. Jun is a 35-year-old UX designer and father of two who enjoys cooking for his family but struggles to balance time, organization, and access to his family’s traditional recipes.

He represents the modern home cook: tech-savvy but nostalgic, busy yet eager to preserve meaningful traditions through everyday actions like cooking.

Persona Insight: Jun symbolizes the intersection between efficiency and emotion. He needs tools that simplify his daily routines while allowing him to reconnect with his family heritage.

Wireframes

Prototyping

Ideation & Early Wireframes

Translating Insights Into Design

Building on the key needs uncovered through research and the user persona, I began the ideation phase by translating user frustrations into tangible design opportunities.
The goal was to craft a product that felt warm, intuitive, and emotionally resonant, while still being efficient for users balancing busy lives.

From user research, three guiding design principles emerged:

Emotional Connection: Incorporate storytelling and visual elements that evoke nostalgia and personal meaning.
Ease of Use: Streamline interactions with minimal screens and clear guidance.
Unified Organization: Create a centralized, visual archive where family stories and recipes coexist.

Design Goals

Help users quickly find and store their family recipes without information overload.
Allow flexibility for multigenerational use. It is simple enough for grandparents, intuitive for younger users.
Encourage emotional engagement through visuals, memory prompts, and voice features.

“Design shouldn’t just store memories, it should help people relive them.”

Style Guide

Design Philosophy

The Heirloom brand identity was built around one idea: “Homemade with love.”

The goal was to create a warm, nostalgic, and approachable aesthetic that reflects the essence of family, tradition, and storytelling. Every design element evokes the comfort of shared meals and the intimacy of passing down memories.

The color palette draws inspiration from earthy ingredients and vintage kitchen tones. The combination of warm oranges and soft pinks captures both heritage and tenderness, balancing tradition with a modern, digital feel.

Final Design

The Digital Keepsake

The final design of Heirloom brings together emotion, usability, and storytelling. Every screen reflects the warmth of family connection, transforming recipes and memories into an interactive, visual experience. The interface invites users to not just store information, but to relive moments through photos, stories, and voice notes.

The result is a space where design meets emotion, and cooking becomes storytelling.

Onboarding & Personalization

Introduces the user to Heirloom’s inviting, home-inspired brand identity.
Users select preferred categories, cuisines, and cook times, enabling a personalized feed tailored to their lifestyle and family traditions.
Gentle typography and soft pinks establish warmth and familiarity right from the start.

Design Intent:

Create a friendly, low-pressure onboarding that makes users feel seen and personally connected to their cooking habits.

Explore Page

Users can browse recipes by cuisine or meal type, using rich photography to evoke sensory connection.
The curved header and pattern overlays tie back to the handmade, heirloom theme.
Clear labeling and a simple search function prioritize usability and accessibility for all generations.

Design Intent:
Inspire exploration by turning discovery into a delightful, visual experience that mirrors flipping through a family cookbook.

Home Dashboard

Personalized greeting to create emotional familiarity.
Quick access cards for recipes and stories.
Subtle background illustrations and warm color gradients maintain an inviting aesthetic.

Design Intent:
Make the experience feel like opening a cherished family scrapbook rather than a typical app dashboard.

Scan & Create Recipes

A key innovation: users can scan handwritten recipes, which are automatically recognized and formatted.
The “Create Recipe” form allows users to upload images, fill in story-based notes, and tag family authors (e.g., “Uncle Richard’s Pumpkin Pie”).
Warm burnt sienna outlines and subtle shadows create a tangible, scrapbook-like aesthetic.

Design Intent:
Bridge old and new by letting families preserve handwritten recipes digitally while retaining their emotional authenticity.

Home Dashboard

A hands-free, step-by-step mode guides users through each recipe stage with visual prompts and swipe gestures.
Large fonts, contrast, and imagery ensure clarity even while cooking.
Ingredient lists appear alongside clear progress indicators, reducing cognitive load.

Design Intent:
Support real-world usability — make cooking intuitive, mess-free, and emotionally rewarding.

Impact

Our Impact

User testing with 12 participants showed clear improvement in usability and engagement after the final prototype.

85% of users reported high satisfaction with the new features.
Participants described the interface as “intuitive,” “warm,” and “easy to use.”
Most testers said they would use Heirloom as a tool to share family recipes and memories long-term.
The Cooking Mode and Recipe Scan features were rated as the most valuable additions for daily usability.

“It feels like something my mom and I could both use. It's simple for her,

but still beautiful and modern.” -User Testing Feedback

These outcomes validated the project’s mission: emotional design can enhance usability and create meaningful digital experiences.

Reflection

The best products connect data with emotion.

Designing Heirloom reinforced my belief that the best products connect data with emotion.
This project challenged me to balance functionality and storytelling, ensuring that a modern, efficient interface could still evoke warmth, nostalgia, and family connection.

What I Learned

Empathy drives clarity: Observing users’ frustrations with cluttered recipe sites taught me how minimal design supports emotional comfort.
Accessibility is legacy: Designing for older generations reshaped how I approach clarity, font size, and color contrast.
Iteration is storytelling: Every usability test refined not just the visuals, but the feeling of using the app — transforming tasks into shared rituals.

Challenges

One key challenge was integrating handwritten recipes while maintaining legibility and emotional authenticity. Through prototyping, I learned how to preserve visual texture without compromising readability, a balance between sentiment and structure.

Next Steps

To further develop Heirloom, I would:

Integrate AI-assisted transcription for handwritten recipes.
Add voice storytelling features to attach spoken memories to each recipe.
Explore family collaboration tools such as shared editing, notifications, and story threads.

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