Cookin
Empowering Home Cooks: A Design Journey to Revolutionize the Food Delivery Space
Team
Year
Role
2021
Product Designer
Product Manager, 2 Product Designers, 4 Engineers
Downloads
App Store Rating
Cooks Onboarded
Meals Delivered
4.8+
10K+
80K+
350
Project Overview
Cookin is a food delivery app that connects amateur home chefs with people looking for authentic, homemade meals. At Playground Inc, I worked on the mobile app, web app, and marketing site to create a cohesive experience for both cooks and customers. My contributions included UX design, UI design, component system, and QA collaboration.
Challenge
Home cooks do not operate like restaurants. Their schedules, menus, and kitchen setups vary daily. Many cooks also view food as a personal expression, not just a transaction. Customers, on the other hand, expect clarity, reliability, and trust. The challenge was to support this informal ecosystem with tools that worked for both sides of the marketplace.
Empowering Cooks to Own Their Craft
We focused on tools that gave cooks creative control and helped them express their unique identity.
Flexible Menu Management
Cooks could edit their menus daily or schedule meals ahead of time, giving them full control over what they offered. A saved meals system made it easy to reuse previous dishes without rebuilding from scratch, streamlining their workflow.
Clarity, Comfort, and Confidence
To support a smooth customer experience, we focused on making each cook’s availability clear. Since home cooks often operate on varying schedules, we designed a view that lets customers see when a chef is available several days in advance.
Selecting a day updates the menu in real time, allowing customers to see what is being offered during that window. This helped set accurate expectations and made the ordering process feel simple and reliable, even within a flexible cooking schedule.
From Idea to Impact
Cookin launched with strong adoption.
10,000+ downloads with a 4.8+ app store rating
350+ cooks onboarded and more than 80,000 meals delivered
Consistent product experience across mobile, web, and marketing
This project helped me design for a non-traditional user base in the food delivery industry and create experiences that reflect cultural diversity, flexibility, and real-world behavior.
Personalized Storefronts
Each cook had space for a personal bio and culinary background, helping them share their story. We also redesigned the cook and meal cards with larger images to make dishes stand out and reinforce Cookin’s focus on authenticity and real people.