Mobile App UI Design
Pepper
Designing cooking streaks and cooking challenges for Pepper: making progress visible, celebrating consistency, and giving home cooks a reason to return.
Cooking streaks
A little progress.
A lasting habit.
The Cooking Streak feature turns engagement into a clear, game-like goal. A prominent counter and flames make progress visible, while a five-week milestone, gift box, and “CLAIM” button make the reward easy to understand.
Streaks appear on the user’s profile to recognize their engagement and in a pop-up after posting to encourage them to keep going. The proposed Instagram “Share Streak” call to action adds social proof and gives users a way to celebrate their consistency.
The rhythm
Start cooking.
Keep coming back.
Start a streak
Post a recipe on the app.
Keep it alive
Post at least once every seven days. The weekly window makes consistency achievable without requiring a post every single day.
Key KPIs & metrics
What Was Measured
Success measures for evaluating the feature.
- Feature adoption rate
- The percentage of active users who start a streak in a given week.
- Streak retention rate
- The percentage of users who maintain an active streak week over week, with checkpoints at 7, 14, and 30 days.
- Days active per user
- The average number of days per week a user posts or completes a qualifying action to maintain their streak.
- Share rate
- The percentage of users with a streak who successfully share it to their social channels.
Cooking challenges
An invitation
to join in.
A challenge invitation introduces the opportunity to earn extra Spice and be featured on Pepper Global. The challenge feed brings the host, featured dish, participation count, and entry action into one view.
Interactive feature demo
Try the
daily trivia.
A playable look at the daily food trivia feature I helped bring into testing. Tap “YES CHEF!” to explore the demo.
Open demo in a new tab ↗13% increase in D7 retention
Among 3,000 active users who entered the trivia beta, day-seven app retention was 13% higher than in a control group of 3,000 users without the feature over the same period.
Design considerations
Consistency
with breathing room.
Habit formation & retention
A forgiving weekly window could support longer-term retention without punishing users for missing a single day.
Depth vs. breadth of engagement
The definition of a qualifying action matters. Letting low-effort interactions sustain a streak could encourage surface-level activity instead of actual cooking and recipe uploads. The goal is to support meaningful participation, not just preserve a counter.
DREAM