Designing Potlucky

What is Potlucky?

Potlucky is a web application that lets you create, share, and track your potluck progress. A couple of months ago, I had the privilege of redesigning the UI/UX alongside my former college roommate, Gavyn Ezell. From the start, one of our core goals was to preserve the unique charm and personality he had built into the original experience.

Prototyping

After getting up to speed on Gavyn’s vision, we compiled our notes and dove straight into prototyping. While my Figma skills are far from professional, I focused on building a more consistent design system — establishing clear rules for elements, typography, and spacing across the interface. Not everything shown below made it into the final product, but working through those explorations was essential for narrowing down what actually worked.

The color theme was deliberately minimal — a restrained range of greys anchored by a primary orange for high contrast. Rather than introducing new colors, the goal was to give the existing palette clear purpose and intent, ensuring each hue was applied only where it added the most value.

Core Features

A pain point we both knew firsthand was not having a clear picture of where the group stood on dishes. As development progressed, we made it a priority to solve this. The result was our dish goal modal — a breakdown of progress by category that makes it easy to see what still needs to be covered at a glance.

Taking inspiration from tools like When2Meet, we also explored what a sign-in experience could look like. We briefly considered building a custom auth flow, but given the scope of the project, we opted for something lighter. Potlucky simply asks for your name before you can add a dish — our frontend logic handles the rest, tying any additions or deletions to that name for the session. The tradeoff is that refreshing the page requires signing in again, but it was a conscious choice that kept things simple without compromising the core experience.

Here’s a quick demo of an early version of the app. The UI has evolved since then, but the core behavior is largely the same.

Conclusion

Looking back, Potlucky was a genuinely rewarding project — a chance to get back into design thinking and build something people can actually use. If you’re planning your next potluck, give it a try at the live site, or take a peek at the GitHub repository if you’re curious about how it’s built.

And a huge shoutout to Gavyn, the original creator of Potlucky. Be sure to check out his blog too!