Samsung Food: Ingredient Substitutions

Outcome

The swap reached every user in release 4.78 on 26 June 2023. The diet filter followed behind its feature flags as the Premium layer, in what became Samsung Food+. It put the matches for the user’s diet first in the list of replacements. Most swaps were made to adapt a recipe to a diet. The usage figures are not public.

Context

Users could save, plan and shop a recipe but had no way to edit its ingredients. Of the recipe edits logged in Amplitude in November 2022, 30% changed an ingredient. Users with a diet or a food sensitivity had no way to adapt a recipe, and in the Premium survey one user wrote: “My husband is sensitive to alliums and I need a low sodium diet. It’s hard to figure out if I can modify a recipe or not.”

The brief was to suggest substitutes by diet and preference, for Basic and Premium users, before the Premium v1 date.

Turning a swap into a recipe users can keep

Over three iterations and a first user test in December 2022, the team had established that users could find and complete a swap. I took the workstream over from Iteration 4, in April 2023, and designed the swap as one journey, from the ingredient row to a saved copy.

01Round one

Letting users swap an ingredient on any recipe

In Iteration 4, the swap sheet opened from an ingredient row. Dialogs asked whether to save the edit and whether to update the meal plan, since the recipe could already be in it. Each iteration is one Figma page, reviewed with the PM and engineering, and the next one is built on the outcome of that review.

Testing what users expected to be free

The team had yet to decide which part of the swap belonged in Basic and which in Premium.

We ran concept tests with users to inform that decision. Users expected a list of alternatives to be free, and vegan testers asked for options outside their diet to be removed.

Keeping the swap free, with the diet filter in Samsung Food+

The PM settled the split between the tiers on what users expected to be free.

02Round two

Handling edge cases and saving several swaps at once

A replacement can be two items, such as chia seeds and water for an egg. Both quantities go on one line, which fits the longest names without the text jumping. When an ingredient has no replacement, the list falls back to search and logs the gap for the food graph team.

The recipe page has no save state, and a lighter edit screen there meant a second editor to build. After engineering review, we moved every edit into the Recipe Builder instead, and the swap sheet went into the Builder as well, so several ingredients can be swapped before one save.

Making ingredient rows read as tappable without tooltips

Growth had retired tooltips, so users had to find the swap without one. In design review, the team asked for rows that read as tappable without help text. In Iteration 6 I prepared three ways into the swap and ran them on Maze in May 2023: a line of help text with a one-time tip, the tip with a subtle icon on every row, and a chevron on every row. Testers found the tap in all three, so we took the lightest forward and added a Braze slide-up at launch telling users they could tap to swap ingredients.

03Handoff

Releasing the swap to every user ahead of the diet filter

I handed over Iteration 9 with the released journeys and their states. We put the diet filter behind feature flags for Beta and Premium users, so the swap could reach every user first. In the released flow, tapping anywhere on an ingredient row opened the item sheet, and after the swap the recipe opened in the Recipe Builder to save as the user’s own copy.

What was cut, and what was released

We made each cut after a test result or an engineering review.

Sources

• Ingredient management, simple substitutions ↗Figma, iterations 4 to 9 and the release states
• Tap variants testMaze, May 2023
• Recipe editsAmplitude, November 2022
• PrototypesIteration 4 ↗Iteration 6 variants ↗Iteration 9, the released flow ↗