design leadership at irobot

iRobot represented an exciting step for a few reasons: a) I would lead not only UX & UI where I was comfortable, but would add packaging, industrial design, & design research. b) I needed to build & scale a design team & c) I’d educate the company about UX design & why focusing on experiences vs hardware + features was so critical.

Who are our customers & what do they need?

Upon arriving at iRobot, it became apparent that we didn’t have a comprehensive understanding of how we were doing. I had a few Roombas prior to joining the company & noticed significant experience gaps, but that wasn’t collectively understood inside the company. So design partnered with product management to spend time with our customers & potential customers & identify pain points, opportunities, how to make people happy re floor cleaning. I knew we needed to create momentum around this so we branded it internally as FUTRX, not only to help socialize the findings but also to set it up as an ongoing discipline. It was an agile, sprint based, rough prototype, iterative process where we learned a lot over 10 weeks. We socialized the findings broadly & it had so much impact that it turned into a full product/app redesign across the entire portfolio. It was tested by marketing & was shown to have significant business impact, so was branded as iRobot OS with ongoing, bi-annual product releases. We summarized our findings into what we called our Experience Framework, which we use for discovering & prioritizing experiences to build. Lastly, we created a rolling Top 10 Experience Gaps combining our research & partnering with Customer Care which is also used across product & engineering for identifying & prioritizing work.

understanding the context of use

Alongside getting our arms around how our product experience was performing, I wanted to understand what people thought of the look & feel of robots too. And how that might be different between say Texas & Tokyo. And so we went to places like Texas & Tokyo….and LA, France, Germany, etc. It’s really one of the coolest parts of making floor cleaning & lawn mowing robots - you have to understand the context especially of cleaning & what homes are like in that culture. Unfortunately, we aren’t quite large enough to easily monetize regional designs, so we had to place these cultural constraints together into one global design. We created modular models so people could essentially build their own, describe why it was right for them, & place them where they most wanted it to be in their home, as well as compare & contrast those with key competitor products. After lugging these models around the world we came away armed with fantastic insights that set our general design strategy & specifically our tiering strategy for the next 5+ years.

Redesign the App

As we organized our FUTRX findings into an experience framework, we came to understand that our current products & app were missing some key ingredients. People wanted control of how, where, when their product cleaned. They wanted clear product status. And interestingly, they wanted a more thoughtful product that better fit into their specific lifestyle vs what was commonly the case, where you had to work around the product. When we examined our current app more closely we realized it lacked much of what our customers were looking for. So we began a series of iterative sprints designing & testing app features & interfaces, choosing a direction & built & launched what is considered the industry leading app today with a 4.6 star rating on the App Store. User priorities are prioritized top to bottom & thumb reach optimized. In order to enable personalization as much as possible we integrated more deeply with Google & Amazon for voice control than any of our competitors, & also embedded IFTTT into our app so hundreds of smart home devices could be used as unique triggers for automated cleaning (eg - have Roomba clean the hallway & kitchen once the garage door closes in the AM).

Establishing a design language

Our original industrial design team was asked to style engineering solutions more than design from scratch, & bigger swing programs were outsourced to expensive agencies. So we rebuilt the team, improving our talent level so that we became drivers for new designs, & no longer relied on agencies. We recognized that part of what was lacking was a comprehensive DL (design language) across our entire portfolio. So leveraging our Roomba heritage & some of the stronger prior agency work, we built out our DL for the entire portfolio including new categories. We leaned into trending strategy & believed our brand, our customer’s desire & opportunity to differentiate lay along the path of blending into the home vs standing out as tech. Logo treatment was elevated, controls were aligned, tiering was designed for & validated, loud colors were replaced with warm neutrals, high gloss with matte & textures, plastic with spun metal & leather. Both DL & trending strategy have yielded a very desirable & differentiated design for iRobot hardware.

Building & scaling a design

Building design from almost scratch in an engineering company is never easy. I’ve learned that recruiting, hiring, & creating a compelling culture have to be at the top of my list - always. We had a nice, steady build from 2 to 50 world-class, diverse designers, writers & researchers over four years, but doing it through COVID was really challenging. (Zoom game nights & virtual petting zoo tours only go so far, but we made it). Establishing the need for new competencies, convincing leadership that we’re integral for product success, that our ROI is tied to CSAT & sales/pricing, that our size should be proportionally linked to engineering, that we can discover our best product opportunities, not just “make things pretty” afterwards - all of these fall on me to progress. And all the while we have to excel at collaborating & influencing with limited authority. I’ve also learned that a critical factor of scaling is in building & depending on an excellent leadership team…that while I want to be a design leader & not just an org leader, the better our leadership team & the more independent the healthier the team & the better the work.