ONE PAN

One Pan is a mobile cooking platform that helps college students make simple, affordable meals with what they already have.

Role: Product Designer
Tools: Figma
Project Type: Mobile App / Food & Lifestyle
Year: 2026

The Problem:

How might we make cooking feel easier with what students already have?

College students want to cook, but meal planning is often expensive, time-consuming, and dependent on ingredients they don’t already have.

The Solution:

One Pan turns what you already have into something worth cooking.

Instead of starting with a recipe, One Pan starts with the ingredients already in your kitchen. Users can quickly add what they have, discover realistic meal options, and follow a simple cooking flow without overthinking it.

Understanding the User:

Different students cook differently — but they share the same constraints.

To understand how One Pan could fit into real student life, I explored three user types with different schedules, budgets, living situations, and cooking confidence.

System Design:

A warm, simple system built around everyday cooking.

One Pan’s visual language was designed to feel approachable and easy to navigate, using soft neutrals, warm orange accents, clear typography, and reusable components to maintain consistency across the app.

The Final Product:

The full One Pan experience.

From ingredient selection to recipe discovery and cooking, the final interface brings the system together into one simple, consistent experience.

I.

Design around real constraints.

Designing for students meant accounting for limited time, budgets, ingredients, and kitchen space. Keeping those constraints visible helped me make more realistic product decisions.

Takeaways

II.

Simple doesn’t mean basic.

Reducing friction was less about removing features and more about making each step feel clear, intentional, and easy to understand.

III.

Consistency builds confidence.

Creating a design system helped the experience feel more cohesive across discovery, recipe selection, and cooking, while making the interface easier to navigate.