Overview
An intuitive recipe finder and inventory tracker designed to help beginner home bartenders mix with confidence.
Timeline: 2 months
Role: UX/UI Designer
Tools: Figma/FigJam
Year: 2026
Simple Homebar is a lifestyle app designed to lower the barrier to entry for at-home mixology. The goal was to make at-home cocktail making more approachable for beginners.
As home cocktail making grows, beginners often feel overwhelmed by recipe discovery, ingredient management, and estimating drink quantities with what they already have.
A mobile app that helps users discover cocktails based on their available ingredients, manage their drink inventory, and estimate the drink quantities.
Spotting an opportunity in at-home cocktail making experience
At-home (DIY) cocktail consumption has grown significantly in recent years, driven by rising interest in home entertaining and the increasing cost of dining out.
According to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, the majority of spirits in the U.S. are consumed at home, highlighting a strong shift toward home-based drinking experiences.
This presents an opportunity to design a more intuitive, simple and personalized solution that helps users discover cocktails based on the ingredients they already have.
User Interview
Interviews revealed a split between hobbyist at-home bartenders and those who found making cocktails at-home a hassle. Participants consistently valued simplicity, while limited tools and knowledge, ingredient management, and concerns about waste often made the process feel more difficult.
Pain Points & Opportunities
Users struggled with not knowing what they could make, intimidating recipes, ingredient waste, and fear of making mistakes. These pain points revealed opportunities to simplify recipes, recommend cocktails based on available ingredients, and provide clearer guidance for beginners.
Project Goals
The goal was to make at-home cocktail making more approachable for beginners while helping users make better use of ingredients they already have. I prioritized solutions that balanced these user needs with opportunities to encourage continued product engagement.
User Personas
Two primary user archetypes emerged from the research: the beginner experimenter seeking confidence and simplicity, and the budget-conscious social host focused on efficiency and reducing waste.
The Design Solution
Wireframes
Key mid-fidelity wireframes were created to define the app’s core structure and user flows. This helped map out the information architecture for the Home and My Bar tabs before visual refinements.
Final Prototype
The final prototype focused on three MVP features designed to address the most important user pain points: reducing decision fatigue, simplifying cocktail-making for beginners, and minimizing ingredient waste.
MVP Feature 1 - Guided Drink Discovery
The Drink Discovery feature helps users quickly find cocktails through search and guided filters. Users can browse recipes by Ingredient, Flavor, Mood, or Season, reducing decision fatigue and making recipe discovery feel effortless.
MVP Feature 2 - Inventory-based Recipes
The Inventory-based Recipes feature allows users to input the ingredients they already own and instantly discover cocktails they can make. To encourage exploration and reduce waste, the app also recommends near-match recipes based on missing ingredient(s) (e.g. missing 1, missing 2, or missing 3 items).
MVP Feature 3 - Inventory Tracking
With Inventory Tracking feature, users can manage their ingredient inventory while estimating how many drinks they can make based on the quantities they currently have. By adjusting the ingredient amounts, users receive an instant estimate of the number of servings available for a selected recipe.
Reflection & Future Considerations
One of the biggest lessons from this project was realizing how different my assumptions were from users’ actual behaviors. Features I expected to be straightforward sometimes became the biggest sources of confusion during usability testing. This experience reinforced that great design comes from listening to users, testing early, and continuously iterating rather than relying on intuition alone. While participants responded positively to Simple Homebar app’s approachable design and beginner-friendly experience, their feedback also revealed meaningful opportunities to further improve the experience.
Users interact with interfaces very differently than expected, testing early prevents bigger problems later.
Next Steps
Future development will focus on clarifying feature purpose, creating a more intuitive onboarding experience, and strengthening visual hierarchy throughout the app while keeping simplicity in mind. While the core MVP was validated through usability testing, there are still opportunities to refine the experience before further testing and development.
Looking ahead, I plan to develop Simple Homebar into a functional MVP, allowing me to validate the experience with real users and continue iterating beyond the prototype stage.
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