Flo Smart Water Monitor & Shutoff

Creating the next evolution of smart leak detection through immersive research with plumbers and homeowners.

Field Research | Moderated Testing | Design Strategy | Product Roadmapping

My role

Lead Researcher

Results

This project is still ongoing, here’s a sneak peek and there will be more to come! 💧🔒

Opportunity

The Flo Smart Water Monitor and Shutoff is the flagship product of the Moen Smart Water Network, a leader in the smart water industry that prevents leaks and mitigates catastrophic water damage for home owners. 

We conducted a research phase with our top user groups of homeowners, pros/plumbers, and showroom consultants. This resulted in finding nuances and problems in the field and starting a roadmap for new enhancements to the product. 

Hardware and Software Becomes One Product Experience

We received the green light to start iterating and evolving the end-to-end product experience. Our goal from day 1 of this project was to take a holistic approach to design by having the Industrial Design and Product Design team work in tandem on both hardware and software. This helps shift in focus helps us design for the best experience, and not the best solution for our specific design specialty.

We presented this approach to our CMO and Design Directors by creating a unified Design Brief at the beginning of this project. This brief set the foundation that of what the product’s design focus will be grouped into 4 categories: our universal design summary, goals, product requirements and user needs.

End-to-end User Journey Mapping for all users

At the start of the initiative, we quickly realized we did not have a central spot for any information pertaining to all our users for the Flo Shutoff. This product is acquired through multiple channels, with multiple users at varying stages of the journey touching this product, to ultimately ending up in the hands of the homeowner. When I documented all users into our FigJam board, it ended up being at least 18 possible different user archetypes!!

My first step was to document the entire user journey in a physical room to my team that comprised of an Industrial Designer and a Product Manager. This helped us start to sticky-note spots in the journey that is a problem or we had further unknowns about.

Knowledge Dump through Internal User Interviews

Once we identified sections of the user journey that we hadn’t researched or been exposed to before, we set up internal user interviews with subject matter experts in each area.

I then compiled my top research findings into one central document that was categorized by Learnings, Challenges and Blue Sky Opportunities that could. be easily shared to our stakeholders and higher up executives.

In-Field Research Proposal + Approval:

Once we filled in the holes of our user journey from our subject matter experts, we then realized we needed to further understand the nuances in the field, not just from our stakeholders.

Many of our subject matter experts’ feedback were specific issues to specific sections of the user journey, extending from a plumber not understanding our product while installing it on a homeowner’s main line, to a homeowner never realizing they need to download the app until the plumber leaves and they’re calling customer support.

I created a research proposal to send to our Innovation Executive to get approval on a small team of me, our Director of Product Design, our Product Mangaer, and our Industrial Designer for in-field user shadowing.

Our goal was to get direct, qualitative feedback and visuals on the entire process of our user journey. This meant we would need to shadow the following groups:

  • our sales team

  • showroom consultants

  • plumbers

  • and homeowners.

We got approval and were on a plane to LA a few short weeks later!

Field Interviews

We packed our 3-day travel trip with the following:

  • 2 Pro Install on a homeowner’s mainline shadowing

  • 2 Homeowner Interviews

  • 1 Showroom Consultant Visit

  • 1 Warehouse Consultant Visit

  • 2 Sales Team Interviews + Shadows

My role during each shadowing was:

  • Video our users to watch back any nuances/issues

  • Have our user expand outloud on any friction points that we observe as they’re working

  • Interview our user after on further opportunities/ideas/friction points that didn’t come up in their session

  • Set up microphone for documenting a future transcript

Socializing Our Results

Once we came back, we dumped all our findings into one central Research Figjam that had all transcriptions, recordings, images, written out user journeys, and conclusions.

We also created two presentations: one for our matrixed Flo Project team of engineering, project management, sourcing stakeholders, etc. The goal of this presentation is to dive super deep into our results and start updating our roadmap and requirements for enhancing the product.

The other presentation we are currently prepping for is a presentation to our higher executives. This will be a higher-level overview of our trip, with the goal to socialize the need for future funding for trips like this so it’s automatically assumed we would have a trip like this, not out of the ordinary!

It was a packed trip, but we were still able to make it to the Hollywood sign!

Results + Ongoing

We are so proud of this trip that brought together product design, industrial design, and product management into one small shadowing trip. We are currently applying these results to our product, and we’ll update this page as we update our flagship product!