FreshFood

Project Concept

FreshFood originated in 2023 as an academic project for an entrepreneurship class during my engineering studies. The goal was to conduct the complete design research process and build a functional minimal prototype. Leveraging my prior design experience, I took charge of the entire UX/UI workflow—conducting user interviews, mapping userflows, wireframing, and designing the high-fidelity screens.

The Journey

As both the product designer and system architect for the project, my responsibilities spanned the entire product lifecycle. I structured the user research and high-fidelity interface layouts while simultaneously drafting the software specifications for a NestJS-based backend. This decoupled service scrapes unstructured culinary recipes using LLM prompts, standardizes measurement quantities, and executes similarity matching queries against catalog SKUs to auto-populate user carts.

This holistic view allowed me to design with engineering constraints in mind, and architect systems around real human behaviors. In the deep dives below, I cover the visual design decisions and usability tests, as well as the backend entity relations and data-ingestion models.

Closing Thoughts

Evolving FreshFood from a design draft into a functional engineering architecture taught me the value of cross-disciplinary coordination. Designing with code in mind—and coding with design empathy—creates products that feel exceptionally polished and behave deterministically.