



What didn't make it
Two directions were live options before this one, worth naming because of why they died, not just that they did.

Clinical-white, science-forward layout
REJECTED
BUILT IN DELIVERY LOGISTICS
Most cooks already had a working, if informal, delivery relationship; not a broken problem worth solving.

Aggressively natural, all-green identity
REJECTED
VOICE BASED ORDER ENTRY
Kitchens are loud and hands are wet mid-service; voice added friction it was meant to remove.
Designing for a first time digital user, not a power user
The dashboard had to do the work of an entire operations team in a single screen. Order status in three colour-coded states, an earnings summary comparing this week to last, five-tab navigation covering every operational need without burying anything more than one tap deep.

Testing under real pressure
The app was tested with four home cooks and eight customers in Mumbai across multiple prototype iterations. Cooks used the prototype during actual service windows, so feedback was grounded in real pressure, not simulated scenarios. What broke under testing wasn't the visual design, it was information hierarchy, what needed to be one tap away versus two.
Reduction in usual coordination time
Increase in repeat orders
of users trusted the design system
Food wastage reduced by
GharSe solved for legibility under pressure, a cook reading their entire day in one glance instead of three apps and a notebook. What it doesn't yet solve is trust calibration. Every stock label and demand prediction is shown with equal visual confidence right now, whether it's backed by six months of order history or six days of guesswork. A cook new to the platform has no way to tell the difference.
If I revisited this, that's the next problem worth chasing, surfacing confidence alongside conclusions, not just the label itself. A "Low Stock" flag backed by real data should look and feel different from one that's an early estimate. That's the gap between a tool a cook uses and one a cook actually trusts.
Vasu Chaudhry
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