Researching the help two cooking appliances should offer

The question

A home appliance maker wanted its cooking appliances to take on more of the work, from guiding a dish to using less energy along the way.

For a new oven, that meant a new way of choosing how to cook, and the question of which kinds of help people would value. For a hob, it meant whether the company’s ideas for more sustainable cooking would add value, and where the product could go after them.

Our approach

For the oven, cooks lived with the new interface online, then walked through it with us one to one, so every kind of help was judged against how they cook.

For the hob, the company’s own feature ideas became the stimulus in three markets, explored in qualitative activities and weighed against one another in a survey built to tell expected features from ones that would delight.

People who already cook in more sustainable ways, and groups that helped us interpret the survey, took the hob work past the features on the table.

What the team came away with

For the oven, product teams had a refined interface and proposition: reworked benefit statements and guidance on its menus and features, with differences between markets drawn out.

For the hob, each sustainability idea could be weighed market by market, on its appeal and on the benefits behind it, with a set of longer-term areas to explore beyond the ideas tested.

Between them, the two pieces of work gave the product teams evidence on assistance for one appliance and on sustainability for the other, while the features were still being shaped.

The two strands also shared a question the company could carry into later work, for everyday meals and more ambitious cooking alike: how much help a cook wants from an appliance, and in what form.