Turning advanced robot behaviors into everyday controls.

At iRobot, I led product UX for a major evolution of the mobile app as robots gained new capabilities like mapping, object awareness, real time status, and smart home integrations. As customer expectations shifted away from hardware specs and toward seamless autonomy, personalized routines, and better lifestyle fit, the app needed to do more than start a cleaning job. It needed to make advanced robot behavior feel clear, useful, and trustworthy in everyday life.

I helped build and lead a multifaceted design team through research, prototype testing, and high fidelity product design for the Android and iOS apps. Working closely with Product, Engineering, and Marketing, we translated customer insights into core app experiences including onboarding, map generation, room labeling, routines, target areas, keep out zones, mission controls, and voice integrations. A key goal throughout was balancing autonomy with user control so the app could act as a clear bridge between human intent and robot behavior.

• Room-label accuracy reached 90%
• Full-map creation was 7× faster, accelerating trust after a single run
• Connected customers grew to 17.6M by the end of 2022 (+26% YoY)
• Revenue from existing customers rose +8.9% (FY2022)

Over the course of 9 week of user research and design discovery while supporting the current app, we emerged with a core set of user experience principles that helped transform the outdate app to the new more personalized user experience.

I helped shape the experience around features like map generation, room labeling, routines, target areas, keep-out zones, mission initiation, and voice control. Each interaction was designed to balance automation with user agency, giving customers enough flexibility to personalize behavior while still keeping the system easy to understand.

Design concepts explored how tasks should be set up, how maps should communicate space, and how people could guide the robot in specific situations without breaking the overall autonomous experience.

A key requirement of the design was to surface problems the robot encountered and give customers a clear way to address them going forward. The dashboard UI was designed to suggest keep-out zones when appropriate.

Our research revealed that every home is different, with its own routines and cleaning needs. In response, the redesign gave users more control by allowing them to create personalized schedules and specify when and where the robot should clean.

As our design sprints went on, we made sure that we were constantly putting prototypes in fornt of users to gather feedback.

We conducted additional reserach and design specifically on mapping ux and ui. User studies included user generated paper mappings of their home where we observed what level of detaiul users required to have a uinderstanding of the ui representation of their homes

The result was a more personalized and understandable app experience that gave customers better visibility, stronger control, and more useful automation over time. Instead of simply triggering a cleaning job, users could shape how, when, and where the robot worked based on the needs of their home. This work helped improve trust in the product, supported faster map creation and stronger room label accuracy, and established a scalable UX foundation for future autonomous experiences.