Timeline
6 weeks
Tools
Adobe XD and Miro
Overview
Roux is a mobile marketplace concept developed as an opportunity to refine my end-to-end UX research and product design skills by architecting a specialized gig-economy platform.
The project tackles a gap in mainstream dining: the lack of access to authentic, culturally significant home cooking for diverse families and busy professionals. To find these meals, consumers currently rely on high-friction, informal networks—such as "plate sellers" and neighborhood supper clubs, where client and creator frustrations directly intersect. Clients face administrative anxiety, juggling disjointed messages, and unverified safety standards. Meanwhile, independent cooks are overwhelmed by the exact same communication chaos, hours of manual scheduling and absorbing financial losses when unvetted buyers flake on orders.
Roux eliminates this shared friction by replacing decentralized workarounds with a unified, secure platform. By integrating automated group bill-splitting, mandatory upfront pre-payments, verified culinary profiles, and structured pickup windows, the application removes the logistical burnout for hungry consumers while protecting the time and revenue of independent creators.
Problem
There's no standardized way for busy individuals' families to find, vet, and book a trustworthy personal chef for regular home-cooked meals. A task intended to save time ends up becoming even more work.
Roux eliminates this shared friction by replacing decentralized workarounds with a unified, secure platform. By integrating automated group bill-splitting, mandatory upfront pre-payments, verified culinary profiles, and structured pickup windows, the application removes the logistical burnout for hungry consumers while protecting the time and revenue of independent creators
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Research
I conducted qualitative, semi-structured user interviews with seven distinct target participants.
The research focused on exploring three primary user ecosystems: a supper clubs, formal catering, and the informal campus/neighborhood "selling plates" economy.
By interviewing both independent culinary creators and regular consumers, the study aimed to map operational workflows, isolate communication bottlenecks, and evaluate how trust and safety are navigated in unstandardized environments.
Affinity Mapping INsisights
Organizing meals frequently forces consumers and chefs to act as accidental project managers and debt collectors.
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Reimbursement Friction: Organizers routinely face social and logistical friction when paying independent cooks upfront out-of-pocket and subsequently chasing down individual guests for payment across disjointed peer-to-peer apps.
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The Invoice Drain: Independent chefs and micro-caterers are heavily bogged down by manual calendar tracking, spreadsheet management, and the friction of generating corporate-compliant itemized invoices for institutional clients.
Disjointed Communication
Without a centralized administration hub, critical operational logistics are scattered across a chaotic mix of SMS threads, Instagram DMs, Snapchat stories, and Facebook groups.
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Logistical Breakdowns: This communication fragmentation results in critical, real-time updates such as sudden headcount adjustments or allergy notifications, getting lost leading directly to costly food waste or unexpected ingredient shortages.
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The Unpredictable Hand-off: The lack of a structured, localized coordination workflow creates a stressful, ad-hoc pickup process, forcing users to rely on frantic text messages to execute hand-offs in driveways or campus street corners.
Vetting, Reliability & Safety Risks
Because the informal food economy lacks structural guardrails, both buyers and sellers operate with minimal security, relying almost entirely on a gamble of word-of-mouth validation.
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Health and Safety Blindspots: Consumers navigating severe food allergies face high medical risks due to the total absence of standardized ingredient labeling, transparent menu profiles, or verified kitchen cleanliness.
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Financial Vulnerability for Cooks: Amateur creators lack the structural leverage to enforce order commitments, frequently absorbing tight ingredient costs out-of-pocket when unvetted customers flake on pickup day.
Institutional Fatigue and Cultural Connection
The high operational friction of the informal food market is actively tolerated by users because the cultural and emotional payoff of the food itself is deeply essential.
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Craving Cultural Connection: Immigrant consumers and diverse culturally diverse leverage these networks as a vital pipeline to authentic regional flavors that mainstream commercial restaurants fail to capture.
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Escaping Institutional Fatigue: Busy professionals and students view independent culinary creators as a primary mechanism to buy back limited personal time and escape repetitive, uninspiring corporate or campus dining alternatives.
The central tension in designing Roux: optimizing for the client experience at the expense of the chef experience would destroy the supply side of the marketplace. A platform that doesn't genuinely serve Sarah will never attract the chefs that make Zola's experience possible.
Empathizing
User Personas
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Self Actualization
Many chefs and cooks are moving away from traditional restaurant work due to burnout, financial uncertainties, and a desire for more control over their work-life balance.
Implications for design:
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Consider functionalities that empower chefs to have greater control over their culinary careers.
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Address burnout concerns by designing features that prioritize a healthy work-life balance.
Hi-Fidelity Mock-ups
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Home Page
The goal of the homepage is to connect clients with chefs as quickly as possible. The optimum path for users is to select the "find chef" function where they will be directed to enter service needs that will then filter out chefs who cannot meet their needs.
Chef Profile Menu
It was important to have customers review and ratings clearly presented to build trust clients have in chefs. Chefs are also required to list ingredients for meals incase clients have special dietary needs.
Item Page
The item page will be available for users to read a short description of the meal and review the ingredients used in the meal in order to check for any to that conflict with dietary restriction.
Chats
Chat function was designed as a means to build rapport between client and chef. It also provides an opportunity to discuss dietary and preparation needs that cannot be accounted for in the design process.
Order History
The order history page is where users will be able to review their past and future services. Users will be able to reorder a previous service without having to go through the hassle of having to remember the name of the chef an meal.
Chats
What's next?
Next phases for this project will should be focused toward designing a chef side interface. This will provide an opportunity to dive deeper into the user needs of service providers. Though chefs were consulted on what would kinds of services would be viable for the app and customer needs, my research was not focused on what would be the most efficient process on the chefs end.
