Understanding Surface cooking.

Consumers want healthy and tasty food but often lack the experience, confidence or inspiration to explore meal variety during the week or new cooking benefits on the weekends.

My role

Timing

The project

By researching what and how they eat and cook, the recipes people are likely using, and their cooking techniques, we aim to inspire culinary creativity, setting our appliances apart in the market.

Year: 2025

Desktop research

We began with desktop research, reviewing existing reports and insights to build on what was already known and spot knowledge gaps. This included competitor mapping, exploring the connected product data lake, tracking current trends, running a quantitative survey in France, Germany, and Australia, and analyzing the most-used cooking apps in Europe.

Understand Phase: Discovering Real Needs

Collecting insights from reports

We reviewed internal Electrolux reports and collected insights to build a clear understanding of current surface cooking. This groundwork helped us define guiding principles to shape and inform the next steps in our field research.

Quantitative questionnaire

A quantitative survey was conducted with 3,000 participants across Germany, France, and Australia to explore current hob usage. The results showed that simple dishes and basic cooking techniques—particularly boiling and frying—were reported most frequently.

Selection based on data , started from the insights from quantitative questionnaire and desktop validation

Field research

A core part of our research was fieldwork: interviewing chefs, observing users cooking in their homes, running a 10-day cooking journal with our teams, and holding empathy sessions where we cooked ourselves with different appliances and techniques.

Chefs Interviews

Learning from chef and internal expert about latest cooking technologies, cooking flow and professional kitchen setup

Talking with Chef Christian Mittermeier

Journaling

Asking our cross functional team to document cooking practices at home

Insights collected during the cooking diary s period

Home Visit+ Interviews

We hold 4 home visits in Sweden, where we asked user to cook for us and walk us through their own cooking process. We use an external agency to run additional interviews in France, Germany and Australia.

Cooking sessions
with the project team

I designed and facilitated a user research exercise where teams in Stockholm and Rothenburg tried real-life cooking experiences — from classic hobs to sensors and fully assisted cooking — to uncover needs and challenges.

Making sense

Continuous sense-making happened at every stage of the project. Each research activity generated highlights and takeaways, which were consolidated and leveraged to build strong opportunities for further development in the CREATE phase.

Making sense :
Building cluster

Impact & Outcomes

Once the opportunity is defined, backed by targeted insights from the Understand phase, it becomes a strategic foundation that the creative team can confidently build on in the Create phase.