What's Cooking
About
What’s Cooking is a recipe app that reimagines cooking as a collaborative, interactive act for Gen Z hands-on foodies. By showcasing curated creators and their ideas, the app empowers users to discover new dishes, personalize recipes, and share their own twists. It frames cooking as a social experience, fostering community, creativity, and joy—building a digital culture that connects young cooks to each other and, ultimately, to the brand.
Challenge
Kraft Heinz wanted to engage Gen Z beyond traditional marketing, building a digital community around food—similar to how Nike connects users through the Nike Running Club. Existing recipe platforms felt static and uninspiring, leaving a gap for a social, creative cooking experience.
Focus
My primary focus was to redesign the What’s Cooking app for a younger, Gen Z audience—making it feel less like a static recipe catalog and more like a social, creator-driven discovery platform. I worked to improve user engagement and retention by introducing features that made cooking and content exploration feel intuitive and personal.
To achieve this, I:
Redesigned the onboarding flow to better connect with Gen Z’s hands-on, expressive approach to food.
Built a robust search function to help users quickly find recipes based on mood, ingredients, or creators.
Introduced recipe collections that encouraged users to save, organize, and share their favorites—driving re-engagement.
Designed a review flow to help users provide feedback on recipe quality, reinforcing trust and community.
Our design philosophy mirrored that of platforms like Spotify: shifting from pure consumption to discovery and self-expression, positioning What’s Cooking as a space for creativity, connection, and identity around food.
Insights
Through focus groups, surveys, analytics, and internal feedback, we identified Gen Z foodies as our core audience—hands-on creators who value authenticity and delight. Insights around drop-offs and low engagement informed a redesigned onboarding flow, introducing motion, storytelling, and personalization to connect users emotionally from their first session.
Hands On
I designed and prototyped core product experiences including onboarding, search, recipe collections, and reviews. Using Figma and Jitter, I built high- and low-fidelity prototypes with interactive flows and motion that emphasized usability and delight. I led the redesign of onboarding, introducing a Gen Z–friendly narrative and a pre-signup video to boost engagement. The prototypes served as a central tool to align the team and stakeholders on product vision, tone, and functionality while ensuring smooth handoff to developers.
Outcome
Helped achieve 100k+ Monthly Active Users through new engagement and discovery features
Boosted onboarding completion with a redesigned, narrative experience
Enhanced user trust and retention through reviews and creator content
Improved design velocity and alignment across cross-functional teams
Delivered a cohesive, Gen Z–driven mobile experience centered on creativity and community
What I Learned
Bringing examples from highly successful apps into design discussions clarifies vision and inspires better solutions.
Early alignment with PMs and Developers is critical—proposing staged launches (minimum viable, enhanced, best-case) demonstrates long-term product thinking.
Storytelling in onboarding and content discovery can transform first-time users into engaged, returning users.
Motion, tone, and community make experiences feel alive—not just functional.
Team
Dominique Suraya — Product Designer
Brian Cass — Design Lead
Fernando Rojas Acuna — Motion Designer
Julie Stolberg — Copywriter