App Design

One of the worst parts of being an adult, at least for me, is deciding what's for dinner.

Every. Single. Night.

And then upon deciding what I want, I can't find the recipe. Did I screenshot it? Save it on social media? Bookmark it? Send it to somebody else? Who knows?

First world problems, I know.

But I wondered if I could create something that removed some of that mental load without making meal planning feel like another chore.

With the assistance of Base44, Lovable, and Claude, I designed an app to help solve this problem. The starting point was a simple recipe library. Users can upload recipe links and images, which are then stored in one central place. But I wanted to take the idea further than simply creating another recipe storage app.

The main feature I focused on was the meal planner. Rather than requiring users to plan an entire week from scratch, Dinner Queue allows them to create a week, fortnight or even a month of meals from their recipe library. The result is intentionally simple: a list of what's for dinner, without needing to repeatedly make the decision each day.

I also wanted to account for the fact that sometimes you just don't want to choose. If the user doesn't want to select their own recipes, Dinner Queue can do it for them. This turns the app from something that simply stores recipes into something that actively helps remove the decision-making involved in planning meals.

A key design decision throughout the process was keeping the interface as simple as possible: fewer decisions, fewer steps and less friction while planning meals, with the goal of making weeknights feel a little easier.

Open the app, see what's for dinner, and get on with the rest of the evening.