Bakeful: A Mobile Bread Baking App.

2025

Personal Background

I spent many years baking sourdough bread from New Orleans to Edinburgh to Chicago. I learned the craft of baking in addition to the value of being a strong communicator and educator.

Over the years, I have seen many people attempt to pick up the craft only to throw in the towel after only a few attempts.

Problem Statement

Many people find bread baking to be a daunting task to get into. The investment in time and difference between thinking like a cook and like a baker tends to be murky and undefined.

So...

How might we help someone gain an understanding of the benefits of baking at home and get over those first few bad bakes?

User Interviews

Being able to pivot part way through a bake was a major point that almost every user brought up.

Competitve Analysis

I selected the 3 highest rated bread baking apps for mobile devices to research. Some were very picture heavy with huge blocks of text and others were basically just glorified timers.

As a visual learner, strong UI elements seem critical to the process. It could be an interesting angle to “gamify” the baking process to help keep users engaged over longer periods of time

Needs

The app needed to be simple, visually familiar and easily modifiable. A “help” feature seemed to be important to assist bakers in the event of a mistake or missing ingredient.

From the business standpoint, I imagine a flour company or some kind of nutrition specialist being able to utilize this app.

Personas

To help guide the process along, I built a few personas that exemplified everything I learned in the research phase.

Homebaker Helen is the novice baker looking to get better at baking.

Expertise Eric is an advanced baker looking to keep track of his progress as he pursues a mastery of certain recipes.

Feature Set

Categorizing different bakes according to skill level and time available with modifiable start and stop times was important.

Having the ability to reference previous bakes and add notes was essential.

Sitemap

The sitemap is built on the user’s needs.

Flow

The most common flow for baking a new recipe.

Inspiration

I took a lot of queues from my favorite cookbooks in terms of aesthetics. Simple, direct colors that reference earthen colors.

Low-fi

It was important for the user that the UI to feel tactile and familiar, so i referenced handwritten notecards.

Style Tile

My style tile needed to be simple and direct. I stayed with gentle, calm colors and rounded, friendly fonts.

Bakeful, all together

A few key frames from the user flow.

Component Library

All components necessary to build the basic pages from the sitemap and primary user flow.

Prototyping

Using the components and style tile, I constructed a basic user flow for starting a bake and encountering a problem.

I felt that a major takeaway from the user interviews was the need to pivot in case they were out of an ingredient part way through.

“If I don’t have an ingredient midway through a recipe, I’ll think what can I substitute.”

Because of this feedback, I focused a portion of my prototype on creating a “Help” Section for missing ingredients.

Results

I conducted usability tests with all of the original participants. Results yielded some very helpful information. I changed the hierarchy of a few pages and reorganized the notes section.

Help was a problem.

The help feature didn’t meet user’s expectations at all. 100% of the users couldn’t find it and ultimately felt it wasn’t helpful for what the needed.

“I would lock my phone and go out and buy salt”

Back to the user’s needs

I went back to the original interviews that I conducted to see if there was another solution to the problem at hand.

What I noticed was that the novice bakers that I interviewed didn’t prep anything in advance, whereas the more experienced bakers were adamant about prep.

Both styles of baker voiced similar concern in regards to missing an ingredient, but the key distinction was when the missing ingredient was discovered.

Confirmation