Samsung Food: Ingredient Substitutions

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.

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.

Mapping the brief

I took the workstream from Iteration 4, in April 2023, after three iterations and a first user test in December 2022. From there I designed the swap as one journey, from the ingredient row to a saved copy.

01Round one

Swapping from the recipe page

Each iteration is one Figma page, reviewed with the PM and engineering, and the next iteration builds on the outcome. Tapping anywhere on an ingredient row opens the item sheet, and after the swap the recipe opens in the Recipe Builder to save as the user’s own copy.

Concept tests

I run user research to inform a direction or to validate a solution.

The concept tests, run to inform the direction, showed that users expected a list of alternatives to be free, and vegan testers asked for options outside their diet to be removed.

Splitting the feature across Basic and Premium

02Round two

Edge cases and one save path

A replacement can be two items, chia seeds and water for an egg, and one line with both quantities held 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 meant a second editor to build. Engineering review moved every edit into the Recipe Builder, and the swap sheet went into the Builder as well, so several ingredients can be swapped before one save.

Usability and comprehension

Growth had retired tooltips, and design review wanted rows that read as tappable without help text. Testers found the tap in all three variants I ran on Maze in May 2023, so the lightest went forward, with a Braze slide-up at launch.

03Handoff

Handing over the swap

I handed over Iteration 9 with the released journeys and their states, and the Premium layer went behind feature flags so the swap could reach every user first.

What was cut, and what was released

Each cut came from a test result or an engineering review.

Outcome

The swap reached every user in release 4.78 on 26 June 2023, and the Premium layer went live after it, behind its flags. Most swaps adapted a recipe to a diet.