Posted on 11th October 2023

Picking apart Samsung Food - a UX Design exercise

The 'Whisk' app recently acquired by Samsung has been our go-to app for managing our shopping list and recipes for a number of years. An incredibly useful tool that undoubtedly makes cooking decent meals regularly less of a chore.

To accompany the formal studying of UX Design I'm doing, I thought it would be a worthwhile exercise to examine the UX of an app I commonly use.

Context Context Context

One of the takeaways (pun-intended) of my thinking more about UX in recent times has been how context is very relevant to good UX. So let's look at the Samsung Food app in general terms and the context of its use. The app has two main functions:

• Managing shopping lists
• Managing recipes

This is supplimented by various features such as

• Discovery of new recipes,
• Importing existing recipes
• Saving recipes
• Commenting / making notes on recipes
• Adding lists of ingredients direct to baskets of supported grocery websites
• Sharing lists & recipes in various ways

Archetypes

Let's take the use of the app by my wife and I as part of our 'user research':

User archetype - the 'shopper'

In the case of my wife she usually uses the app on a laptop in order to pick recipes and complete an online grocery shop. Usually she will write a physical list of the items we might already have down on paper. I will check we have these and cross them off while she carries out the shop. This could be done via the app but we find doing it by hand easier and quicker.

User archetype - the 'chef' (ok perhaps cook is more appropriate idk)

During the week once our groceries have arrived on most evenings I will cook the dinner, or start cooking while my wife finishes work. I go into the app on my phone and select a recipe. Usually the recipe I select depends on when the items in the order go off first and what we fancy eating that evening. So we don't really make use of the feature to put a recipe on each specific day of the week, even though the flow of the app means you kind of have to (we also never bother marking a recipe as 'cooked'). I will look at the ingredients in the recipe first, get them all out, then proceed to cook the dinner using the recipe.

My user experience

In general this all works well. Clearly the UX of the recipe finding / importing, facilitating a grocery list and order, and recipe recall is working well.

There are however some issues relating to our (fairly basic) usage of the app. Mostly unnecessary features getting in the way as I may have already hinted that hamper the experience.

In particular (taking my own experience for a moment) going into a recipe, retrieving the ingredients required and then cooking the recipe according to the instructions could be smoother.

1. When you first go into the app it loads a home page. I've never used a single feature on this page. Being able to customise your start page or home page view would speed the process up

The app homepage

2. The 'planner' page/view that I go to first displays a 'previously planned' feature at the top. Again I've never used this feature. So I have to scroll down to see a list of all the recipes. I'd prefer a view where I could see all the recipes for that week on one screen (as mentioned before we don't use the day of the week feature)

The app planner view

3. When you go into a recipe is where things really start to go wrong. Picture the scene: I'm hungry, we lead busy lives and I've worked up the motivation to cook us a lovely meal. I just want to crack on with it. But what is all this information and options I've been given?

Why would I want to add notes, 'mark as cooked' or add my recipe to anything at this point?

Why are there two fields to leave a note?

Why would I want to rate, share or take a picture at this stage?

The app recipe view

I don't mind the image of the meal at the top I'm aiming to cook, that gives me something to shoot for. But what I really want right now is the list of ingredients. I have to scroll down to get it. But even then I can only see a fraction of the items on the list.

The app recipe ingredients list

4. Moving to the recipe instructions view. Now I know there is only so much they can do with this, given the recipe website URL could display all manner of formats that the Samsung app can't control. However again I'm presented with multiple duplicate buttons / icons and an annoying hovering 'mark as cooked' button.

The app recipe instructions view

How can this be made better

I think the most important lesson here is that an app like this absolutely cannot be all things to all people at all times. A shopping list / recipe app sounds dead simple right? It's really not if you want to offer the depth and breadth of features that this app does. It's not that this is a problem - in fact the feature-rich nature of the app is probably part of its success. But an app like this must have a much better focus on the type of user and their intentions and constrain the options given depending on the context of its use.

The most annoying thing really is totally outside of their control - all the popups on the third-party websites we use for the recipes. But much of this annoyance could be mitigated by simply removing many of the other features offered to the user and having a much better optimised UI for small mobile screens.

Of course I could just use a tablet which would help and in many cases more complex use of apps are much better suited to larger screens. But, and I know this may shock some people, we don't have a tablet. And even if we did, there's clearly some duplication going on with the features that needs to be resolved.

Conclusion

There are probably many other good and bad points about the UX of this app that could be teased out by considering other user types and use cases. This is just an example and exercise in looking at some of the things that could be changed that seem so obvious to me. Though I suspect with the evolution of the app and increasing complexity these 'obvious' things have become very unobvious or difficult to change for the developers. I get it and I've been there. The point is I don't want to be there any more, and neither should any self-respecting software engineer or designer.

Well I hope you enjoyed this quick app design discussion, I suppose I better get cooking the dinner.