Foodie Notes
Foodie Notes is an iOS app aimed at helping food bloggers, aspiring chefs, and culinary adventurers capture well-organized notes about their fine-dining experiences. I partnered with a developer and chef-in-training to define, design, and develop this experience.
CLIENT
Private
COMPANY
Freelance
ROLE
UX/UI Designer
Culinary tourism is about exploring a destination through its food and drink, seeking out unique, memorable experiences. It’s more than just eating on the go or snapping a quick Instagram shot — it’s about immersing yourself in the details. The presentation, ingredients, pairings, and the emotions they evoke all shape the experience. This is memory-making stuff, and well-worth documenting.
Capture all the things.
In 2024, I was approached to design an iOS app that would simplify and streamline note-taking while dining — because no one visits a Michelin-starred restaurant just to be glued to their phone the whole time. I’ve long believed that the best app experiences don’t try to be everything to everyone, and this project was a chance to put that philosophy into practice, designing solutions for a handful of specific user needs:
01
Keep it organized.
Make it simple to capture notes for each part of my meal and keep them nicely organized for later review.
02
Accelerate my input.
Make capturing notes and photos as efficient as possible so I can get back to my meal and dining companions.
03
Connect the dots.
Find ways to augment my notes with additional details so they’re as useful as possible when I come back to them later.
The meal is the memory.
When considering the organizational schema for this app, it was clear to both myself and my developer that the meal was the critical object to orient ourselves around, as it is the unique dining experience you have (even at the same venue) that makes the memories. Your notes and photos for each meal slowly creates a trip down memory lane of “remember that time we went there and had that?” Or, if you’re capturing notes for professional reasons, a set of nicely organized material for later reference.
Within each meal three distinct groups of information: details about the venue, details about the overall meal experience, and specifics about each individual course.
01
Keep it organized.
While every fine dining experience is unique, they share the same underlying structure. Each meal has distinct details to capture, shaped by one or more menus that describe multiple courses and beverage pairings. To simplify what is often a tedious note-taking process, we created a simple, extensible meal template that ensures your notes and photos on any aspect of your meal always have a place to go.
02
Accelerate my input.
With each meal packed with details only you can provide (photos, notes) we looked for every opportunity to streamline the easy stuff, so you could get back to your meal. Give us the venue name, and we’ll automatically log the date, time, and location of your visit. Adding a course? Start with a list of common course labels. Capturing a wine label? Yeah, autocorrect will have a field day with that — we’ll run OCR on your label photo to extract the name for you. It’s not foolproof, but when it works, it feels like magic. And in any great app experience, a little magic goes a long way.
03
Connect the dots.
Throughout the app we looked for ways to automatically connect you to richer details via external sources. Entering a venue name and Michelin star rating links you directly to its Michelin Guide profile. Capturing a beverage’s name and year — whether by photo or text — allows us to provide a link to its tasting notes from wine-searcher.com. These are rich details for future-you, helping you rediscover that one unforgettable wine or track a favorite restaurant’s rising success.
Don’t be a ray of sunshine.
If you’re somewhere fancy, there’s even odds it’ll be subdued lighting. To help avoid the ire of your dining companions (and the rest of the dining room) we made sure to include an option to switch to dark mode for more considerate note-taking.
Design systems are just the best.
This experience was built using a design system framework I’ve been assembling and refining for fun on the side. Having a fully connected system with adjustable variables allowed me to move fast and remain flexible throughout design and prototyping, really streamlining design-dev collaboration and pre-development user research.
Outcome
Foodie Notes is under final review and will be available on the iOS app store soon.