The Toro Company
•
2022
Lynx Drive is the industry’s mission-critical platform for managing complex irrigation across golf courses, sports fields, and expansive landscapes. Despite its reputation for reliability, the legacy system—built over a decade ago—had grown cumbersome, visually outdated, and difficult for new users to master.
As Senior Designer, I led the end-to-end redesign and UX transformation of the desktop experience. My approach combined comprehensive audits, deep stakeholder engagement, and ongoing user research. The result: a scalable, intuitive, and future-proof platform trusted by thousands of professionals worldwide.
This case study details the desktop transformation. Explore the mobile case study →
Senior Designer
UX/UI Design
Design System Architecture
Prototyping & User Testing
Stakeholder Alignment
Developer Handoff
Product Management & Engineering
In-house UX Research
Field Technicians & Beta Users
A ground-up reinvention of the world’s leading irrigation platform.
Lynx Drive is the global leader in golf irrigation management—trusted by nearly 90% of PGA-certified courses and recognized as the benchmark for precision and reliability. Its unmatched performance made it indispensable, but also fostered resistance to change.
As the essential control hub for large-scale irrigation, Lynx Drive empowers superintendents, technicians, and managers to handle everything from zone programming to real-time alerts and seasonal forecasting. Yet, years of feature additions had left the interface cluttered, overwhelming, and prone to user error. My mandate: lead a comprehensive design overhaul that would restore clarity, efficiency, and confidence.
As Senior Designer, I owned the transformation from initial research and product framing through UX strategy, prototyping, and final handoff. This case study charts the journey from ambiguity to a platform users now call “finally intuitive.”
We reinvented the control map as a spatial command center—enabling users to intuitively inspect, diagnose, and act in real time from a single, unified view.
— Veteran Lynx Operator, East Coast
A gold-standard platform, hindered by legacy complexity.
Lynx Drive has long been the backbone of large-scale irrigation management—respected for its reliability and deep integration into daily turf operations. Yet, as the system matured, features accumulated without a strategic rethink of navigation or user flow. The result: workflow bottlenecks, mounting cognitive load, and steep learning curves for new users.
The original Lynx interface surfaced every control simultaneously—overwhelming users with dense tables and nested menus. Mastery required institutional knowledge and constant vigilance to avoid costly mistakes.
— Longtime Irrigation Technician, Arizona
Deep empathy as a foundation for innovation.
To uncover true user needs, I embedded with irrigation crews before sunrise, analyzed support logs, and observed live workflows via screen share. I listened for moments of friction, workarounds, and unspoken frustrations that shaped daily routines.
Superintendents were selected from diverse regions to capture variation in climate, scheduling, and maintenance strategies. Interviews included both Lynx veterans and users migrating from competing platforms.
Simultaneously, we conducted deep-dive interviews with 12 internal stakeholders spanning product, engineering, support, and training. These conversations revealed hidden pain points, misaligned assumptions, and downstream challenges that shaped our UX priorities and design investments.
Through this process, we defined three core personas—each with distinct roles, pressures, and daily rhythms. By mapping their responsibilities to specific workflow phases, we tailored the platform to real-world usage: early morning system checks, mid-day interventions, and end-of-day planning.
Mapping personas to daily rhythms informed interface defaults, user roles, and permission-based flows.
By shadowing superintendents and technicians across diverse courses, we meticulously documented every Lynx Drive interaction. This journey mapping exposed not only when users engaged with the system, but also how their mindset and environment shaped their effectiveness.
Dawn is the most critical window. Superintendents arrive before sunrise to assess overnight irrigation, review system health, and plan the day’s maintenance.
Key Finding: Users lost up to 45 minutes each morning switching between six system views to gather essential data. 84% kept paper backups due to low digital trust.
Critical Pain Point: “By the time I’ve checked everything in the system, I’ve already missed something on the course.” — Lead Superintendent
This high-activity period demands constant adaptation and seamless team coordination.
Key Finding: Teams used an average of 3.7 methods (texts, radios, paper logs, photos) to track field work—causing major information gaps and handoff failures.
Critical Pain Point: “I’m always flipping between my phone and the office system—stuff gets lost in the cracks.” — Field Technician
Evening prep is vital for overnight success—demanding precise coordination and thorough verification.
Key Finding: 92% of overnight system errors traced back to incomplete verification—often because the interface made thorough checks too difficult.
Critical Pain Point: “There’s no way to know everything is set right without checking every screen. It’s nerve-wracking.” — Lead Superintendent
This granular journey mapping transformed our approach. Instead of simply modernizing the UI, we engineered context-aware workflows that adapt to time of day, environmental factors, and team dynamics—resulting in a 60% reduction in morning configuration time and a 75% decrease in overnight irrigation errors.
What users told us—and how we turned insight into action.
Interactive mapping—especially on mobile—sets Lynx apart. Users demand real-time status, diagnostics, and system updates directly from the map interface.
Most superintendents use just 20–30% of Lynx features. We identified opportunities for contextual tooltips, micro-animations, and AI-powered suggestions—especially to streamline Watering Plan updates.
Users want clear visibility into change history and more intuitive controls for limiting system changes—especially in advanced setup scenarios.
Operators seek fast, flexible ways to group, reorder, and update watering programs across devices. A streamlined, focused Watering Plan grid is a top priority.
Users want concise, actionable Course Reports that highlight issues and provide clear diagnostic guidance.
Operators need to see projected flow updates in real time while adjusting Watering Plans—enabling efficient validation and iteration.
— West Coast Superintendent
Designing for clarity, speed, and confidence—when it matters most.
Our guiding objective was to make users feel informed, fast, and in control—especially under time constraints. I established three core UX pillars:
With these pillars, I mapped every major user journey—from login to planning and resolution—directly to our strategic objectives. Every flow, wireframe, and interaction reinforced the experience we set out to deliver: speed under pressure, clarity amid complexity, and confidence across every role. This approach shaped not just screen layouts, but also system architecture, interaction patterns, and onboarding.
Armed with deep research, we set out to systematically eliminate friction and reimagine the mental model of Lynx Drive. This was not just a redesign, but a fundamental re-architecture—tested and refined with the very professionals who depend on it daily.
Designing for the Daily Rhythm:
Our research revealed three critical user moments that shaped every operator’s day:
We anchored our flows around these moments, ensuring the system supported users when they were most time-pressed, mobile, or collaborating.
Navigation Reimagined
We overhauled the information architecture—consolidating redundant paths and replacing technical jargon with user-centric language. A persistent, interactive breadcrumb provided instant orientation—a universally praised improvement.
Planning with Certainty
The new End-of-Day Planner streamlined task handoff and review. Users could instantly see what was planned, completed, or required attention—all in one customizable view.
Interactive Mapping
The legacy map tool was replaced with a dynamic, visual layout of zones and systems—overlaid with real-time feedback. Every action triggered immediate visual confirmation and status updates.
Bridging the Field-to-Desk Divide
One of the most transformative innovations was the “Field Notes” system. Previously, technicians relied on analog notes or ad hoc texts—resulting in lost information and poor continuity. Our digital notes panel is:
This feature proved revolutionary. Teams now log valve repairs, soil anomalies, sensor issues, and calibrations in real time—turning fragmented communication into a transparent, traceable team resource.
“Now when I log something in the field, HQ sees it instantly. That changes everything.”
— 14-year Lynx superuser, Arizona irrigation technician
The Field Notes panel let techs log real-world issues that synced instantly to planning dashboards.
Planning with Confidence:
The End-of-Day Planner became a daily essential. Users gained closure on the day and a head start for tomorrow—eliminating ambiguity and missed handoffs.
“I use the planner every night. It gives me closure—and a jump on tomorrow.”
— Golf Superintendent, managing 3 pump stations
We transformed the breadcrumb from a passive label into an active orientation tool.
The redesigned planner view helped superintendents wrap up their day with clarity and hand off context to the next shift.
We rebuilt the central control map with real-time overlays for quick diagnostics and zone adjustments.
Every major flow mapped back to one of three daily user moments: Morning Check-In, In-Field Adjustments, and End-of-Day Planning.
Showcasing with Impact: GCSAA Golf Show
To build excitement and validate our vision, I developed high-fidelity, interactive Protopie prototypes—used for user testing, internal demos, and as the centerpiece of our booth at the GCSAA Golf Show, the industry’s leading technology expo.
The prototypes simulated real workflows with pixel-perfect fidelity and custom motion, bringing Lynx Drive to life in ways static screens could not. Demoing to customers and prospects on the show floor, I gathered instant feedback—many called it the most intuitive, modern system they’d ever seen, and a quantum leap from their current tools.
This moment proved we were not just improving usability—we were redefining industry expectations.
Our interactive prototypes became the talk of the show—seamlessly blending authentic UX with live user feedback.
— Training Lead, Midwest
A redesign that set a new company standard.
This project did more than modernize a legacy tool—it fundamentally changed how our company approaches software. Lynx Drive became the first system to fully embody our new UX vision, shifting our culture from utility-first to experience-first.
We instrumented Lynx Drive with Mixpanel (events, funnels, cohorts) and Hotjar (heatmaps, session replays), and conduct regular in-product surveys and recurring user tests. Dashboards are reviewed weekly, and quarterly field studies ensure every release drives the right KPIs.
This instrumentation empowers us to make data-driven decisions, validate design hypotheses, and track real improvements in customer outcomes—guiding feature investment and support focus.
The broader impact goes even further. The Lynx Drive design system is now the foundation for every major UX initiative company-wide—from internal tools to new product launches. Our process, documentation, and this case study have become benchmarks for cross-functional excellence.
What began as a redesign is now the blueprint for how we build everything moving forward.
The Lynx Drive design system powers multiple new projects across the organization, ensuring a unified, modern user experience everywhere. Its principles and components now accelerate delivery and raise the bar for usability across all platforms.
The Lynx Drive design system in action—powering a new generation of internal and external products.
