The Smart Map is the central place to understand your home and customize how your robot cleans. In an effort to evolve Smart Map more than just a basic outline of your home, we explored future of Smart Map. This new design was selected as the ‘north star’ of the map experience and has been guiding the mapping team’s roadmap.
ROLE
Lead Designer
TIMELINE
Nov 2019 - Feb 2020
Users who use our Smart Map feature love it, but around 17% of users never customized their map meaning they didn’t use the feature that they paid extra for. And less than 50% of users who customized their maps used core features such as Keep Out Zones or Clean Zones. We took a step back and approached the problem as if we knew nothing about maps and starting from scratch.
Our current Smart Map boundaries were not walls but areas robots could reach, worsening the comprehension experience especially for the novice users.
After setting up their maps, users rarely interacted with Smart Map because there were nothing else to do other than editing zones from time to time.
Update Smart Map so that it’s easy to understand without studying it. Show right amount of key information to help users reading it.
Most people prefer visual over text. Smart Map has so much applicable use cases to support user experience.
Completely redesigned map has true wall and fixtures helping users to orient themselves inside the map. Simplified large furnitures guide users to place zones more precisely. Users can always toggle which layer of information to hide or show. Floor types are the key indicators of how to clean your home.
Visualize the status of your cleaning mission live on your Smart Map. View which room your robot is cleaning and how much is left. Different colors are used to represent different types of cleaning. Open up the timeline to view and edit the mission.
When your robot gets an error and is unable to clean, you can locate where your robot is instantly with the Smart Map and fix the issue quickly. This will be especially helpful when the robot is stuck under the furniture and battery runs out. It will remember the last location of your robot and show it on the map.
We combined cleaning reports that are currently generated per robot basis into one. One mission report has all the information you need: Where and how it was cleaned. Icons represent cleaning types, vacuum or mop, coupled with color coding for easy recognition. You can view a robot specific clean report.
The final design was presented to the leadership and has been used as a guiding principle for the mapping team. Some features could be built right away and some of them required additional investigation and development. The team has decided to breakdown the design into smaller parts and phases to build them simultaneously alongside other initiatives. Floor type and layers toggle were the first features to be built and tested. We are continuing to iterate based on feedback to improve user experience.
Smart Maps are essentially a representation of your home in a 2D space. We wanted to find out the level of detail and type of information on the map - what do they need or don’t want to see on the map? We visited people’s home to have a contextual in-depth interview and conducted a co-creation session of their places. We synthesized findings and identified key user expectations.
Users were constantly loking for recognizable objects to help them orient to their space. Permanent fixtures such as built-ins or large furnitures and area rugs were the first objects that people placed on their map. Visual detail and/or labels helped participants recognize objects on the map.
Users wanted spatial context such as cleaning mission information on the map. They preferred live information over summaries at the end. This provided transparency to them.
Users wanted the map to reflect elements needed to control how/where was cleaned.
After identifying core needs of the users for the map, I focused on visualizing the information on the map. Because there were so many variables and combinations, the research was broken into 3 phases.
First phase was about the structure of the map. Only the built-ins and area rug was presented. The designs were intentionally in greyscale as colors were reserved for key highlights or actions.
Phase 2 tested digital elements on the map. I included various types of zones, labels, and mission information. The key focus was on representing cleaned area vs to-be cleaned area vs unreachable space. On top of this, different types of cleaning needed to be distinguishable easily as the vision was to use a single map for all robots. Currently each robot had its own map even if multiple robots were in the same space and we wanted to streamline the experience.
Finally, large furnitures and details were added and tested. The result varied from participant to participant but overall consensus was that furnitures don’t need label or much detail as long as they are recognizable. People especially appreciated the view with a robot in action under the furniture. They liked to see the more realistic status of robot.
