Say Buh-Bye to Brush Clutter: Designing Tomato, the Bathroom Floor Cleaning Hero
Let’s face it, keeping bathroom floors sparkling clean can be a constant battle. We all know the struggle — hair clumps, grime, soap scrum and the never-ending fight against slippery, and wet floors. But what if there was a way to simplify this task entirely?
The case study will explore the power of user-centered design, starting with the solution — Tomato (yes, I named my solution “tomato” because, why not? I love tomatoes 🍅 another way of saying that I couldn’t think of a good name 😛), a bathroom floor cleaning robot. We’ll then delve into the problem it addresses, and finally explore the design journey, and Critical decisions I took that led to its creation.
p.s: This project is a part of my level 1, Growth School’s UX Design Career Accelerator program. I am grateful for the guidance of my mentor, UX Anudeep.
The Tomato Blueprint — A Chapter Guide
- Solution: What Exactly does Tomato do?
- Core Problems: Why Tomato was born? A Glimpse into the Bathroom Floor Cleaning Struggles Users Face
- Backstory: design journey that led to tomato
- Critical Decisions: Taps and Turns, Decisions That Shaped Tomato
- Future Scope: Beyond Tomato, a Cleaner Horizon
- Key Learnings: Insights Gained on the Path to Designing Tomato
(P.S.: I made the prototype entirely using Figma, Pretty cool what you can do with that software, right? 🤯)
As a UX design newbie (coming from a CS background!), Figma is the only professional design tool I got my hands on so far. I experimented with Figma’s vector tools to create custom shapes, and loved the freedom the pen and curve tools gave me!. And of course, gradients for that realistic touch. Prototyping for this project was a great learning experience for me! It was fun experimenting with all the tools in Figma and I’m pretty happy with how the prototype turned out. Interested to know exactly how I did this on Figma? Reach out to me on Linkedin
Alright, enough about me — let’s get to the good stuff!
Solution: What exactly does Tomato do?
Imagine a robot that glides across your bathroom floor, leaving it spotless and gleaming. That’s Tomato! It takes care of everything from sweeping to gather dry or wet dust and hair, prepping the floor, applying cleaning solution evenly, and scrubbing the floor to eliminate dirt, grime, tough stains, and grout lines. Tomato then rinses the floor, and uses its squeeze setting to direct water towards the drain. Finally, the built-in drying mechanism removes excess moisture, leaving the bathroom floor clean and dry.
Let’s dive a little deeper into Tomato’s features!
Tomato can automatically recharge, refill its water tank, and cleaning solution whenever the levels are low through its dock station(Tomato’s home). This compact station, about the size of a small cabinet, takes up minimal space in the bathroom.
The dock contains two tanks: a larger one for water and a smaller one for floor cleaning solution. Users just need to plug the dock and connect it to a tap, and they’re good to go. The water tank refills automatically, and the cleaning solution tank is big enough to hold an entire cleaning solution bottle available in the market (enough to last for months!), eliminating the need for frequent refills.
Tomato has pre-programmed options for full floor cleaning routines. Need a quick refresh? Hit “quick clean.” Want a deep scrub down? Select “deep clean.” And for those “just set it and forget it” moments, there’s the automatic mode.
Users can also create a customised cleaning routine tailored to their bathroom’s specific needs! they can choose multiple individual cleaning steps and create a routine. For example, if the user only wants to address clogged drain to remove hair or dust, and wet floor, they can select unclog drain, and dry floor and click start.
Users can track how many cleaning steps are left, along with the estimated time remaining in the section below programs. Only the steps included in the chosen routine will be lit up — completed steps will be disabled so users know exactly where Tomato is in the process.
Tomato keeps an eye (or should we say sensor? ) out for anything needing user’s attention. A low water level or a full dust tray will trigger a red LED alert on the screen and starts buzzing gently. These smart alerts🚨 ensure user know it’s time for a refill or quick empty to keep tomato running smoothly.
Tomato uses suction power and specialised brushes to collect wet dirt and stubborn hair clogs which then gets stored in the dust tray. It also removes remove soap scum, hard water stains, and anything else lurking on the floor. The best part? Emptying the tray is a breeze! User can click a button on the display, and the tray pops out for easy disposal — no need to get hands dirty!
I put the dust tray release button in the control panel screen, instead of having a push to open tray or a button closer to the tray, to minimise the risk of accidental tray opening during routine cleaning or when Tomato bumps into nearby objects like the commode or a bucket.
Tomato comes with a variety of specialised brushes cleverly integrated within its compact design. This eliminates the need for a cluttered collection of cleaning tools. Each brush tackles a specific task: collecting hair, reaching corners, push water towards drain, scrubbing away stubborn stains, etc.
Built-in sensors at the bottom analyse the floor condition, and automatically adjusts adjust its cleaning strategy based on the condition of the floor.
Behind the Scenes: How Tomato Simplifies User’s Bathroom Floor Cleaning Routine
Core Problems: Why Tomato was born? A Glimpse into the Bathroom Floor Cleaning Struggles Users Face
The idea behind Tomato came from listening to real people’s bathroom frustrations, Let’s dive into all the problems my users mentioned during qualitative interviews, and how tomato addresses them.
- ⏳ Time Constraints: Busy schedules often lead to neglected bathrooms, resulting in excessive dirt buildup over time. Consequently, users are forced to spend their precious weekends on extensive cleaning sessions instead of relaxing. Cleaning solutions require long wait times for dirt breakdown further extend the chore, adding to user frustration.
✅ Tomato for rescue: Quick, seamless, and easy-to-integrate programs help users prevent excessive bathroom dirt buildup and maintain a clean bathroom floor every time, fitting seamlessly into their busy schedules and daily routines. - 😮💨 Physical Exertion: Users find cleaning bathroom especially the floor labor-intensive due to a combination of factors: the extensive surface area, frequent stubborn grime buildup, and the need for spreading cleaning solution application evenly and extra scrubbing in hard-to-reach areas like corners or the area between commode and wall.
✅ Tomato for rescue: Tomato reduces manual effort to almost zero by automating the entire bathroom floor cleaning process. Users simply need to select a program, start it, check for alerts, fill the cleaning solution once every few months, and empty the dust tray once a week. - 🤢 Unpleasant Conditions: User feels uncomfortable and spends less time in the bathroom due to unhygienic bathroom environment caused by multiple issues such as bad smells, high temperatures, slipperiness and water pooling due to clogged drains.
✅ Tomato for rescue: Tomato tackles the root causes of these issues: efficient cleaning keeps bathroom fresh, prevent clogs, and dry floors ensures no humidity which which eliminates heat traps and bad smells to most extent. - 🪣 Brushes Clutter and Storage Issues: Multiple cleaning tools like broom, mop, scrubber, squeeze, etc. creates clutter as users lack proper storage and resort to placing them in corners. This clutter attracts dust and water buildup around the area. Users also need to remove these tools before cleaning every time adds unnecessary step and extends the cleaning process.
✅ Tomato for rescue: Tomato has all the brushes smartly integrated into its compact space-saving aesthetic design. - 🧹 Inefficiency of Brushes: Existing brushes prove ineffective for specific tasks like removing hair from drains even after multiple attempts, forcing users to resort to manually clean using hands causing unpleasantness.
✅ Tomato for rescue: Tomato’s brush settings are way more affective with suction power and as they are designed especially to tackle focused issues like collecting hair unlike regular brushes meant for all tasks. - 🫧 Drain Clogging: The buildup of hair, soap residue, hard water minerals and dust near the drain, causing clogs over time. This results in water pooling, mold growth, and a breeding ground for bad odors.
✅ Tomato for rescue: Using suction power and specialized brushes, tomato effectively gathers hair, dirt, and solid dust particles. It also removes soap residue, hard water stains, and dust accumulation, reducing the chances of drain blockages, water pooling, and unhygienic environments. - 🌊 Wet and Slippery Floors: Wet and cold floors are a constant source of discomfort, and increase the risk of slipping.
✅ Tomato for rescue: Using the squeeze brush setting, tomato ensures all the water is pushed towards drain, it then uses its floor drying mechanism to dry the floor in a few minutes.
Behind the Scenes: The Bathroom Floor Cleaning Battle Without Tomato
Backstory: design journey that led to tomato
Imagine this: a room full of designers, all hyped up to create something amazing for your home. We were at level 1 discord room, of Growth School’s UX Design Career Accelerator program, and the challenge was to design a physical product for everyday spaces — bathroom, kitchen, bedroom, home office, etc. But the catch? There were only two spots per area, and eleven of us eager to make our mark. Each of us brought our unique strengths to the table, by showcasing our ‘unfair advantage.’ Talk about fierce competition!
On the first day, we debated for the topic area Bathroom. Everyone was buzzing with ideas, shared their product suggestions and highlighting existing problems in bathroom environments. But I had a different strategy — my secret weapon was user-centered design.
Remember you are not the user!
While others were brainstorming solutions, I decided to focus on the real heroes: the users. Here’s the thing: how can you design something people truly need if you don’t understand their struggles? So, I spoke up and said something like this:
“I have no idea what I would be solving for at this moment, neither will I worry about it right now. I will choose my problem based on the interviews I will be conducting to understand my users’ pain points, and I will be solving for it without bringing my biases”
Believe it or not, those three simple lines landed me the “Bathroom” topic! By prioritising what users needed, I was already on track to create a solution that would actually solve a real problem.
User Interviews: Diving Deep into Bathroom Struggles
I prepared questions for user interviews based on three surface-level user goals: Cleaning the Bathroom, Organising the Bathroom, and Taking a Shower. For each user goal, I mapped out the steps of the user journey based on my hypotheses.
Mapping the user journey before interviews provided structure and clarity. At the end, it helped me validate or refine my hypotheses , identify pain points, and uncover opportunities. This approach enhanced my empathy and ensured targeted questioning. Overall, it leads to more insightful and actionable user research.
During the interviews, I delved into the micros with follow-up questions to understand every aspect of user behaviour, including pain points, positive and neutral experiences, decisions, and the sequence of actions users take to achieve each goal. Drawing from insights from the qualitative user interviews, I converged to user goal of cleaning the bathroom floor.
Defining the Problem Statement: Putting the Bathroom Woes into Words
With the user goal locked in, it was time to define the problem clearly. This meant identifying the pain points, potential opportunities to make things better, and backing it all up with evidence from the interviews.
My Problem: As a business, we want to Create a Physical Product to enhance the experience of the users while they try to Clean Bathroom Floor specifically to be able to Ensure the bathroom floor is thoroughly cleaned and dried to minimize moisture retention, eliminate potential sources of unpleasant odors, prevent the growth of mold and fungus, reduce slipperiness, and maintain a comfortable temperature, thereby ensuring a safe, hygienic, comfortable, and slip-resistant floor in the bathroom.
Crazy 8: Thinking Outside the Box!
To tackle the bathroom floor cleaning struggle, I grabbed a pen and some paper and dove into the “Crazy 8” technique. This helped me finalise on the idea of an automatic floor cleaning robot.
Prototyping: From idea to low fidelity
With my idea finalised, it was time to bring it to life. I built a low-fidelity prototype in Figma using rectangles and the pen tool to create custom shapes. Through the process of figuring things out as I went, I gained good proficiency with the pen tool — by the end, I’d confidently call myself a good user of pen tool (if not a master)
Peer Review and Feedback: My Prototype Gets a Reality Check
I presented Tomato to my fellow UX peers, and they gave me some awesome feedback. There were a few ideas I just didn’t have time to fully sketch out, so I added those as text directly under the prototype sketches already made.
For some other suggestions, they were pretty big projects that needed more research, so I filed those under future scope.
Critical Decisions: Taps and Turns, Decisions That Shaped Tomato
This project wasn’t a straight shot — it involved navigating a series of critical choices that ultimately shaped Tomato. Sometimes I had too many options so i needed to converge, sometime my focus was not wide enough so I had to diverge, while sometimes I had to iterate to make it better. Let me talk about my top four critical decisions.
🤔 CD1: Unveiling the Full User Journey (Divergent Thinking)
While sketching the problem user journey of cleaning bathroom floor, I tried to note down the steps the users take to clean the bathroom floor, the initial journey i mapped based on my hypothesis was pretty short which didn’t help me identify many pain points or opportunities.
To gain a deeper understanding, I conducted more user interviews, during these interviews I went as micro as possible to understand their journey by asking follow up questions. Using the insights from interview, I started mapping the journey again. For each step in the journey, I delved deeper by asking myself:
- Why is the user doing this? What is their goal?
- How is the user feeling? what user behaviour can be noticed? Are they feeling frustrated? neutral or happy?
- Is there a better way? Could this step be done differently to improve the experience?
Uncovering Hidden Gems: From Frustration to Insights
This “divergent thinking” approach proved helpful. For example, when I explored the step of scrubbing the floor with a brush, digging deeper revealed a key pain point: physical strain and frustration. I also learned that users often prep the floor by pouring water first. This crucial step, which I initially missed, was then incorporated into the revised user journey.
“Mapping the user journey isn’t just about pinpointing problems. It’s crucial to understand the entire user experience, including not just pain points, but also neutral or positive moments, decisions, and behaviours. By uncovering the complete journey, we can design solutions that enhance not only negative aspects, but also positive or neutral experiences.” — UX Anudeep
🤔 CD2: Converging on a Core Need: Prioritising the Bathroom Floor
At the outset, I identified multiple user goals related to bathroom activities like showering, bathing, organising supplies, etc. Out of which I converged to cleaning bathroom as my user goal. But here’s the thing: when I looked at all the bathroom cleaning struggles users mentioned, it was like a never-ending list! The goal cleaning bathroom involved a lot of things — cleaning commode, floor, walls, storage space. Trying to solve everything using one product is not effective. I had to dig deeper!
That’s where narrowing the focus came in. The bathroom floor emerged as the clear winner in the “pain point Olympics.” It seemed like everyone had horror stories about scrubbing large surface area, fighting mould, and dodging slippery spots. Moreover, the floor is the area with the most physical contact while using bathroom, having a clean floor is essential for a comfortable bathroom experience. By focusing on this one area, I was able to prioritise and build something that truly addressed user needs.
“Converging the focus too much on the user goal could restrict insights and the problem will not be wide enough to build a product, while diverging it too much would lead to ambiguity regarding what to prioritise in building the product.” — UX Anudeep
🤔 CD3: 8 Minutes vs. 80 Minutes, Adding details to the ideas
I kicked things off with the “Crazy 8s” technique. With an 8-minute timer ticking, I rapidly sketched out a variety of ideas for tackling the bathroom floor challenge. While these initial concepts were creative, they tended to be surface-level solutions — think quick fixes (consulting solutions) rather than addressing core user needs.
Round Two: Diving Deeper
Not gonna lie, the second attempt took a lot longer — closer to 80 minutes! But this time, I focused on adding details and making sure each idea addressed multiple user pain points.
Out of those 8 ideas, 3 really stood out based on factors like feasibility, how many pain points, and opportunities its addressing:
- The Attachable Assistant: This one was all about convenience. An attachment for existing brushes at home to make cleaning easier. Great idea, but it depended on the durability of the user’s existing brush handle. Imagine if the brush handle snapped — not exactly a win!
- Integrated Brush System: This one kept the handle but built-in brushes. Less clutter and faster cleaning, but still some manual effort involved.
- The Robot Revolution: And then there was this beauty — a fully automatic bathroom floor cleaning robot! Now we’re talking! This one addressed everything: time, effort, reaching those tricky corners…it was a no-brainer!
🤔 CD4: From Paper Sketch to Digital Reality: Challenges and Iterations
My initial paper sketch of Tomato on paper, seemed flawless, or so I thought. However, as I began prototyping it on Figma, exploring various angles of tomato, things took a turn.
The Challenge of Size and Automation:
One key feature was automation — Tomato needed to be self-sufficient, dispensing its own cleaning solution and water. The challenge? Our initial design limited the robot’s size, making it difficult to store enough water and solution for a complete cleaning cycle (typically requiring 2–3 litres). This led to a bulky robot design, which wasn’t ideal for small bathrooms or users with multiple bathrooms who might need to carry it around.
The Docking Station Solution:
So, I started brainstorming refillable ways to address the size and water capacity limitations. The docking station emerged as the perfect solution. The dock could house the water tank and cleaning solution, allowing Tomato to return for refills during the cleaning cycle. This maintained automation while keeping the robot itself compact and manoeuvrable.
Sensor Placement: Balancing Functionality and Privacy
In my initial paper sketch, I positioned the sensors on sides of the robot. However, during the prototyping phase, a crucial aspect came to light — sensor placement in the bathroom could be a privacy concern. To address this, I relocated the sensors to the bottom of the robot. This way, Tomato could still navigate effectively while respecting user privacy.
Future Scope: Beyond Tomato, a Cleaner Horizon
Tomato's innovative design revolutionises bathroom cleaning. But the journey towards a truly spotless environment doesn't stop here. Here's a glimpse into exciting possibilities that could expand Tomato's capabilities in future:
- Scaling up for a complete clean: While Tomato currently tackles the floor, future iterations could extend its reach to tackle grime on lower wall sections. Soap scum and water stains often mar these areas too, and an extendable cleaning arm or a specialised wall-climbing module could be incorporated for a more comprehensive clean.
- Smart Cleaning at your fingertips: Imagine controlling Tomato from the comfort of your couch! A dedicated mobile app could allow users to schedule cleaning cycles, adjust cleaning modes, and monitor Tomato's progress – all from a user-friendly interface. Bending down to select programs would be a thing of the past.
- Effortless portability: Carrying Tomato between bathrooms can be inconvenient. We can explore adding a carrying handles or a self-docking system that allows Tomato to seamlessly navigate between designated cleaning zones in the home. This would eliminate the need for manual lifting and ensure efficient cleaning across different rooms.
- Room service for every room: The cleaning powers of Tomato isn't limited to bathrooms. Future iterations could be equipped with specialised cleaning modules for different room types.
Key Learnings: Insights Gained on the Path to Designing Tomato
This project was a wild ride, and the biggest lesson I learned? Unlearning! Yep, It’s like cleaning out a mental filing cabinet — gotta ditch my biases, and limiting or outdated ideas. The UX world is constantly evolving, and so should our knowledge, tossing out the outdated files and making space for the latest and greatest to shine!
Speaking of shining, my communication skills got a major polish. Thanks to the amazing community, those weekly calls with Anudeep, and daily group calls, I’m now a way more confident speaker. Plus, hearing everyone’s perspectives was a game-changer! Honestly, after Level 1, I feel like a whole new person (well, a more articulate and UX-savvy person, at least).
This whole journey solidified the power of user-centered design. It’s all about becoming a designer who solves real user problems while keeping the business side happy — a win-win! Believe it or not, I could probably write a whole case study just on the things I learned. Maybe next time!
I’d love to hear your thoughts! 💙
I poured my heart (and a little sweat) into this project, so I’m curious — what do you think? Especially, I’m dying to know:
- Team Tomato? Do you think our little robot cleaner has potential to revolutionise bathroom floor cleaning?
- Journey Maps on Point? I dusted off my sketching skills and whipped up some user journey diagrams. It was fun getting back into drawing after all these years! Let me know what you think — did they help visualise the user’s experience?
- Critical Decisions? I made some key decisions throughout the process. Check out the images I added under them and let me know if they make sense. (Bonus points if you can tell I had fun making them myself!)
Thank you for reading the case study. Don’t hold back — any feedback, big or small, is welcome! Do clap on this article.
