Cookmark: Collaborative Cooking Interface

Food brings people together. Cooking with friends and family is both a collaborative and social experience, but it comes with a host of challenges. The most experienced cook usually takes on the role of delegating tasks, which can be stressful. The distribution of tasks is uneven, leaving others feeling uninvolved and unsure of what the other cooks are doing. Recipes lack a way to bookmark the current and completed steps, making missed steps likely, which can jeopardize the meal.

We have iteratively designed a web interface and iPhone application to enhance the collaborative cooking experience, based on our findings from user interviews, surveys, heuristic evaluations, and user experience testing.

Cookmark is a digital head chef that intelligently divides tasks for multiple recipes among multiple people. It takes into account their cooking preferences, so that everyone feels capable and involved, and nobody dominates the kitchen. Cooks have the choice to opt out of chopping onions, using knives, and handling meat, so that they are only assigned tasks they want to work on. They also choose either to help wherever they’re needed or take responsibility for one of several recipes.

As multiple recipes are cooked in parallel, Cookmark can be trusted not to leave out any recipe steps. It shows a colorful trail of finished tasks so that everyone can see who has done what. Cooks relax, feel capable about their cooking, and enjoy the time with their loved ones, knowing that everything will come together nicely in the end.