Kitchenmate
A voice-first recipe experience designed for the Amazon Echo Show 15, where the constraint of a small screen and hands-free interaction forced every design decision to earn its place.
Project Overview
My Contribution
Research design & 2 interviews · Affinity mapping & synthesis · Low-to-mid fidelity wireframes · UI kit · 2 usability tests & findings
Team
5 members (Master's group project)
Platform
Amazon Echo Show 15
Methods
Interviews, Diary Studies, Usability Testing
Duration
Academic semester project
As part of my Master’s in Human-Computer Interaction Design, I collaborated with four peers to design KitchenMate, a recipe app built specifically for the Amazon Echo Show 15.
Unlike traditional recipe apps, KitchenMate embraces voice-first interaction and sustainability-driven features to help people cook in ways that are intuitive, mindful, and environmentally conscious.
🥘 The Challenge
The kitchen is one of the worst environments to use a screen. Your hands are wet, something's on the stove, and you're trying to remember if you added the garlic yet. The Echo Show 15 sits across the room and voice is the primary input which means every word in the interface matters as much as every pixel.
15-inch screen across the room → limited space, read from a distance
Voice as primary input → no tapping, no scrolling, precision in language
Active cooking context → cognitive load is already maxed out before the app opens
The question: "How do you design a hands-free, voice-first cooking experience that reduces food waste without adding to the cognitive load of someone already juggling a hot pan?"
🔍 Understanding User Needs
To understand the real cooking experience, we ran two rounds of research - structured interviews to understand attitudes, and 5-day diary studies to capture actual behavior. What people say they do in the kitchen and what they actually do are very different things.
🎙️Semi-structured interviews (n=10)
Explored cooking routines, recipe discovery methods, and awareness of food waste.
✏️ 5-day diary studies
Captured daily behaviors: meals cooked, shopping habits, and attempts at minimizing waste.
Key Insights
🍞 Food waste is common, especially for families balancing busy schedules.
🌍 Sustainability awareness varies, with some unsure of its daily impact.
💊 Health needs drive choices, especially for those with dietary restrictions.
📺 Video recipes are popular, particularly with younger audiences.
💰 Budgets matter - cost directly influences meal and shopping decisions.
Affinity mapping from our interview data.
👤Personas
Three distinct patterns emerged from the research, not archetypes we invented, but real clusters of behaviour we kept seeing across participants:
Helen – The Busy Mom
Family-focused home cook
⚠️ Struggles with meal planning, often overbuys, wants ways to reduce waste.
John – The Eco-Conscious Researcher
⚠️ Values sustainability but lacks time and culinary confidence.
Nora – The Health-Focused Professional
Health is wealth
⚠️ Manages PCOS through diet, needs visual, clear, and affordable recipe guidance.
💡 From Insights to Concepts
We moved from research into ideation through:
POV statements
Defined core user needs (e.g. “Helen needs an easy way to find recipes that use up her leftovers.”)
Brainstorming sessions
Used Fig Jam and Zoom to ideate on everything from food waste tools to price comparison widgets.
Storyboards & journeys
Outlined step-by-step flows for how users would interact with the app. Created visual stories of how KitchenMate could support different users in real-life cooking scenarios.
Sitemap
Built a rough architecture for the app’s key sections and interactions.
Bringing KitchenMate to Life
✏️ Collaborative Sketching
We sketched layout ideas for major features like:
Recipe browsing
Food waste tracker
Shopping assistant
Recycling guide
The Echo Show 15's resolution and viewing distance drove every layout decision, we were designing for someone standing 4-6 feet away, not holding a phone.
🖥️ Wireframing in Figma
Designed low-fidelity wireframes tailored to the Echo Show 15’s resolution and constraints.
With 5 people building screens simultaneously, visual consistency wasn't optional. The UI kit was our single source of truth.
🎨 Building a UI Kit
We created a custom UI kit with reusable components (buttons, fonts, icons) to ensure visual consistency.
Testing KitchenMate
We conducted 10 usability tests using the think-aloud method, where participants interacted with our prototype while verbalising their thoughts.
"I love that it tells me when my food is about to expire. I'd actually use this." - Usability test participant
✅ What Users Liked
Expiry Countdown helped reduce waste
Recipe Videos supported visual learners
Recycling Locator was seen as an innovative addition
"I wasn't sure what to say to the voice assistant at first, a short tutorial would help." - Usability test participant
💡 What We Changed Based on Testing
Added calorie info to recipe cards after users consistently looked for it
Scoped price comparison to a single store for MVP after multi-store requests revealed scope creep risk
Designed a voice onboarding tutorial after multiple testers hesitated before their first command
Feature Highlights
Healthy Recipe Focus
Based on UK’s Eatwell Guide
Smart Search & Voice Control
Search by voice, image, or ingredient
Personalised Suggestions
Custom recipes based on user profiles
Recycling Wizard
Upload an image or ask via voice to check recyclability
Purchase Companion
Compare ingredient prices, check food miles, support local farms
Family-Friendly Profiles
Manage multiple user preferences in one home
Accessible UI
Adjustable fonts, color modes, voice prompts
Reflections
✔️ What worked
The voice-first constraint actually made us better designers. Every decision had to earn its place because screen space was so limited. A good example: we cut the food waste tracker from the main nav entirely and made it voice-activated only because adding a tab for it would have cluttered the primary cooking flow. Constraints forced the right call.
What I'd do differently
I'd design and test an onboarding flow from the start rather than treating it as an afterthought. First-time users with a voice interface need more guidance than we anticipated, several testers hesitated before speaking their first command, which told us a lot.
What I took away
Designing for voice taught me that clarity isn't just visual, it lives in the words you choose, the prompts you write, and the silences you leave room for. That's a lesson I'll carry into every project.
Final Thoughts
KitchenMate challenged me to design beyond screens and embrace voice-first thinking.
It deepened my understanding of sustainable design and helped me grow as a collaborative, research-driven designer.
Designing beyond screens taught me to think with my ears.