Samsung Food: Swap Meals in the Tailored Plan

Context

Tailored Plan v1 was in Beta: the Tailored for you page, a week of recommended meals matched to the user’s nutrition goals, three rows in view and the rest behind the freemium gate. It sat between the casual planner, released that spring, and the prepopulated planner that later generated the week from it. Beta users asked for the one thing the plan did not do, which was to change a meal they did not want. The brief read “enable meal swapping in TP v1, randomised swap”: show premium users recipe alternatives first, then scale depending on user interaction.

The workstream ran as numbered sprints, one Figma page per sprint with a sprint overview at the top: the brief, the pair on it, the link to the Notion brief and what changed since the last one. Thirteen sprints from Sprint 0 to Sprint 12, a design review at Sprint 10 with its own prototypes page, and a components page kept alongside.

Mapping the brief

Sprint 0 mapped the swap onto the existing Tailored for you carousel on Home and Explore, for the two shapes a meal can take. A single recipe swaps for another recipe. A combo, a recipe with sides, had three options: swap the whole combo for another, swap it component by component from a tabbed sheet, or search for a replacement by name. The entry point was Swap meal in the card’s overflow menu, beside Add to, Send recipe and Save recipe.

Sprint 1 built the journeys out: the candidate list with search, a no options found state that hands over to search all recipes, a Meal swapped toast with Undo, and the same flow for foods, an apple swapped for a pear with the recent foods search behind it. The PO’s note on the quick view asked for nutrition as percent of daily target rather than grams per serving, which is how the plan’s own nutrition goals later read.

01Round one

Journeys for review

Sprints 2 and 3 were the same journeys tidied for an RFC: the recipe swap from the tailored carousel, the food swap, the quick view with a cleaner nutrition module, and entry points from the Recipes for your oven and Breakfast ideas collections. Sprint 3 is stamped 99% late stage on its overview, “minor updates on iteration 2, ready to share on RFC”.

Descoping to single recipes

Dev feedback at Sprint 4 removed two of the three cases: no combos, no foods. The swap became single recipes only, with the rule on the board that Swap meal shows only when candidates are available. Sprint 5 added the freemium journey: a free user tapping the entry point lands on the Samsung Food+ paywall, with a note that a Plus tag on the menu item itself might reduce conversion, so it stayed off. The confirm dialog, “Add meal to your plan?”, appears here for the first time, because the swap is technically an add to plan.

Splitting the entry points

Sprint 6 renamed the action. Because the flow adds a meal to the plan, the label became More like this, more comprehensive than Swap meal. The entry points were split into three cases, each a different tech effort so that each could be delivered separately: the tailored carousel on Home and Explore, the Tailored Plan page, and the Meal Planner’s tailored row. Sprint 7 folded in dev and A&A feedback after a call with the engineers. Sprint 8 integrated the latest DR round and aligned the meal cards with updates from Explore and Home: button sizes, the backgroundRaised token on food item buttons, and the plus icon deprecated in favour of the add to plan icon so the experience stayed consistent across the app. A No candidates available case covered all users.

02Design review

Card and experience variants

Sprint 9 put four card variants for the Tailored Plan page to the team and asked for a ranked preference: modified search cards, a new portrait card extended from the search cards, modified meal plan cards, and a larger meal plan card. Sprint 10 was the DR itself, and its overview is candid: “there had been some miscommunication previous sprints, but I think we are fully aligned now”. The scope narrowed to the Tailored Plan page; the other entry points left this workstream. Three card variants and two experience variants went to the review with a prototype each and two questions, which is the best interface and why, and which is the best experience and why. Experience variant 1 opened a list of alternatives to choose from. Variant 2 swapped the meal directly in place, with a note to engineering: they had said a swap was not possible without adding to plan, and how difficult would it be to support this instead.

Swapping in place

The rules on the board: each meal cycles through a maximum of ten candidates, then starts again. Once a meal is added to the plan it cannot be swapped, not ideal but easier to build, and it can be swapped again if removed. Swapped meals persist while moving in and out of the Tailored Plan, while the app stays active, and always once added to the plan; they reset when the app does.

03Handover

Cards, states and animations

The Sprint 12 UX and UI section carries the delivered surface: the new Tailored Plan card with a swap control and an add to plan control, states for one meal or more added to the plan and one or more removed, the toasts for each, and the loading state between swaps. The animations section runs the swap through its loading state frame by frame for dev. The card set, recipe and food variants in their default and added states, sits on the components page.

Each cut sits on a sprint overview with its reason beside it: dev feedback for the first three, scope for the fourth, the three-row limit for the last.

Outcome

Meal swapping went live in the Tailored Plan and is still in the app. No usage figure reached design before I left, so none is quoted here.