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Clean When I Leave: Services
Designing an experience for people to come home to clean floors, without lifting a finger.
Clean When I'm Away
2020 - 2021
iRobot

Roles & Responsibilities
Lead UX Design
Lead UX Strategy
Co-lead Research
Design QA & Development POC
Collaborators
UI Designer - Craig Butterworth
Copywriter - Eleah Lubatkin
Animator - Cory White
Design Researcher - Phil Petrides
Problem
Our robots currently offload the physical burden of cleaning, but still require work from the user to remember when and where to clean in their homes. Many people's routines are dynamic, so time-based schedules are not flexible enough to meet their needs.
How can we offload the mental burden of cleaning?
Solution

Set up scheduled jobs that start when you leave home, based on a trigger from your smart home or your phone’s location services.
Get a push notification when you return home that allows you to decide what happens in the moment.

Process

Kickoff
Held a series of workshops with stakeholders to define our scope, goals, and align on the problem we were trying to solve. We’d already done some foundational research, so we could base our ideas on real pain points and user needs.



Learn
Discovery research uncovered some key needs that span across user types:

I want my robot to fit in with my existing routine.

I want my robot to be able to adapt to life changes and disruptions.
I want to be able to start my robot instantaneously, without thinking about it.
Build
I utilized RITE methodology to design, build and test a beta experience that we could learn from prior to production launch. This allowed the team to quickly iterate and get a proof of concept out to users.
Once the beta launched, we tracked usage data and sent an in app survey directly to the beta users to learn both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Test
“Start when I leave home — there it is! That’s fantastic! To me, this is the ideal way that this would just automate itself. If I’m not at home, go do your thing. I don’t have to listen to it or look at it.”
We got plenty of positive feedback from the beta, but there were also some important things that we needed to improve.
Iterate

A key insight from the beta was to lead with the benefit to the user first rather than starting with a prompt to connect to a device.
This lead me to consider how “Clean When I Leave” could be integrated with the robot’s schedule.
As I explored, I continued to run sessions with customers to test the flows and iterated on the design based on their feedback.
Launch
Once the UX was ready, I partnered with a UI Designer, Illustrator, & Copy Writer to refine the wireframes into high-fidelity specs.
I was the point of contact for development, partnered with our data analyst to define key metrics, and worked with QA to ensure design quality.

As we approached launch, we also prepared a patent application and worked with the legal team to file. You can view the published patent on Google Patents.
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