iRobot Hardware Design
MY ROLE
I led a department of 21 including 5 Hardware UX Designers responsible for the hardware touch points on our products, as well as the packaging and user guides. I was hands on with guiding the research and development of the LED patterns, cleaning behaviors, cross-product automations, voice prompts, voice commands, packaging, QR codes, and user guide content.
ROOMBA LIGHT RESEARCH & DESIGN
My team and I designed the RGB light-rings that visually communicate dozens of behaviors and provide feedback for user actions. We also designed the bi-color dock lights used to communicate charging and maintenance needs.
For all new product launches my team tested and defined the requirements for new light-ring patterns and improvements to existing patterns.
For our single-button robots, sending the robot home is done with a long press of the button. Testing showed that users were uncertain about how long to hold the button down without clear feedback so we developed a ring pattern that animated from white to blue and a corresponding audio tone that solved the problem.
We also found that our legacy single-LED charging indicator was not clear enough for our users so we developed a new more prominent and animated charging indicator.
While developing our light pattern library we ensured that critical patterns (like booting, charging, and fully charged) were easily distinguished so they could be described succinctly in setup and troubleshooting instructions.
Post-COVID our ability to test in person was limited, (as was access to prototype hardware) so we created a digital prototyping process to allow us to keep moving.
This design allowed us to test interactions between the robot, the dock, and the app simultaneously to get a realistic understanding of what jobs needed to be done by each component.
Once we had designs that were consistently performing well in testing we worked closely with the Industrial Design team to add our UX requirements to the hardware specifications.
ROOMBA VOICE & BUTTON DESIGN
Roomba's can end up in a lot of different situations as they navigate a home (and sometimes get into trouble). We defined a more robust set of voice prompts and button behaviors for our next-gen robots to dramatically improve their hardware usability.
We improved the clarity of how multiple actions can be invoked with a single button interface, and designed more effective ways of capturing our users attention when a critical error (like getting stuck and running out of battery) occurs through the combination of voice prompts, light patterns, and app prompts.
We also defined the voice commands for the Roomba product line on all three major voice assistant platforms (Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri).
ROOMBA BEHAVIOR: SMART SCRUB
Getting a robot to mop as well as a human was one of our primary goals. I led the process of figuring out which of our possible strategies best balanced user perception, reliability, and efficacy.
We designed multiple scrubbing strategies and tested them for reliability, efficacy, and customer perceptions. Our testing showed that the back and forth motion felt the most natural to our users, and offered the most reliable action.
We then refined and tested variations of this back and forth motion to find the right balance between cleaning efficacy, mission time, and perceived cleaning ability.
Our solution offered a 60% improvement to cleaning ability while satisfying our customers expectations for mission length, and how an intelligent mopping robot should behave.
This was built into all our subsequent mopping robots, and shipped out as an over-the-air update to our existing mopping robot customers.
PACKAGING & USER GUIDES
We also led a packaging redesign effort to cost down, simplify, and improve the unboxing experience for our customers.
Our robots were shipped double-boxed with the retail box nested inside a shippable exterior box.
Our research found that most users struggled to remove the retail box from the shipping box.
We also found that our retail boxes were getting seriously damaged when shipped to retailers on pallets.
To solve these issues we designed a cheaper, more sustainable, single-box solution that could be shipped directly to customers without an exterior box and look good on the shelf of a retail store.
Our testing also found that our quick start card was confusing so we decided to use a QR code on the box interior to direct users to our app setup instructions instead.
For users without the app yet, we developed a way for the QR code to lead them to download the app and then automatically bring them to the quick start experience.
My team also designed and managed the User Guides for all our products, providing clear illustrations on how to use them, the names and locations of their parts, and their maintenance and troubleshooting instructions.
ROBOT LAWN MOWER DESIGN
My team and I designed an outdoor robot interface for our (ill-fated) robot lawn mower to address its unique needs.
Our testing showed that the primary jobs of a robot lawn mower interface (beyond the important and required emergency stop button) were to: prevent children (and strangers) from starting the robot, easily send the robot home, and easily pick up the robot if it ends up somewhere it shouldn't be.
Important secondary jobs of the interface were to: communicate Wi-Fi signal strength (to help users identify dead spots in their yard), and help users understand when there is a charging problem.
Below are the drafts and final renders of our solutions to these jobs-to-be-done. We included a Wi-Fi signal strength meter, a large and bright light strip to indicate errors, a battery meter for more detailed battery information, and a lockout key.
AIR PURIFIER INTERFACE DESIGN
Entering the air purifier market was an opportunity for us to explore how robots and air purifiers could work together intelligently, and to design an interface for product with a built in screen.
I led the design discovery process for exploring how to pair robots and air purifiers.
Our roadmap started by turning on an air purifier when the robot enters the same room.
Next we leveraged the air purifier's sensors to detect pollen or smoke and ask the robot for help picking up particles that had accumulated on the floor.
Following that, we used outdoor AQI levels to proactively start both the air purifier and the robot to clean the air and floors in your home on polluted, high pollen, or smokey days.
As air purifiers are a stationary and informative product, we designed an elegant display interface that seamlessly transitions from giving the user clear information about the air quality in their home to confirming what changed when a button is pressed.
Part of our hardware UX spec can be seen below:
We also defined the voice commands for all the settings and controls for the air purifiers for all three voice assistants.
