The Toro Company
•
2025
Toro Oasis is a new residential platform that helps contractors design, install, and support connected irrigation and outdoor systems for homeowners—without forcing them to juggle clipboards, controller manuals, and ad hoc text threads.
As Senior Product Designer, I led the definition and design of the end‑to‑end experience: from the first on‑site visit through system setup, homeowner handoff, and ongoing service. Working closely with product, engineering, and field sales, I translated an early concept into a clear platform vision, UX framework, and detailed flows that could scale to thousands of properties.
This case study focuses on how we shaped the contractor and homeowner experience for Oasis—turning a vague idea (“make it easier to manage smart yards”) into a concrete, testable product direction.
Senior Product Designer
End‑to‑End UX Design
Information Architecture
Prototyping & User Testing
Service Blueprinting
Design Specs & Handoff
Product Management & Engineering
Sales & Contractor Success
Pilot Contractors & Homeowners
Helping contractors deliver modern, connected experiences to everyday homeowners.
While Toro’s professional platforms are trusted to run some of the most complex irrigation systems in the world, the residential experience lagged behind. Contractors were stitching together phone photos, paper notes, controller manuals, and text messages just to get a single property configured and handed off to a homeowner. There was no single source of truth for “what’s in the yard” or who was responsible for what.
Toro Oasis was conceived as a unifying layer between contractors, connected controllers, and homeowners—a place where properties, devices, and programs could live together in a way that felt intuitive, resilient, and ready to scale. The challenge: turn a loosely defined idea into a concrete product that actually works in the field.
As Senior Product Designer, I was responsible for defining the experience vision, structuring the information architecture, and designing the key interactions for setup, handoff, and ongoing monitoring. This required balancing three distinct perspectives: what contractors need to get in and out of a job efficiently, what homeowners need to feel confident, and what the business needs to support future services and devices.
Oasis gives contractors a single, structured view of every property, device, and program—turning scattered artifacts into a coherent service experience.
— Irrigation & lighting contractor
Contractors need to move fast. Homeowners expect consumer‑grade clarity.
Residential work happens under real pressure. Contractors are on site with limited time, poor Wi‑Fi, and a truck full of parts. They may be installing irrigation, lighting, and connectivity in one visit—while answering homeowner questions and keeping an eye on the next job.
Homeowners, on the other hand, just want things to “work.” They don’t want to think about zones or flow rates; they want simple schedules, clear alerts, and confidence that their yard is protected—especially when they are away.
Without a dedicated platform, this gap showed up everywhere:
Before Oasis, contractors stitched together photos, paper, and controller UIs to manage each property—resulting in inconsistency, callbacks, and lost context.
— Oasis pilot contractor
We designed Oasis from the driveway, not the conference room.
To ground the product in reality, I partnered with product and sales to observe contractors in context. We rode along to installs, tagged along on service calls, and interviewed homeowners shortly after their systems went live.
Three primary personas emerged:
Oasis had to work for contractors first—but every decision ultimately shaped the homeowner’s day‑to‑day experience.
Mapping the combined contractor + homeowner journey revealed that most friction clustered around three moments: first‑time setup on site, the handoff conversation, and the first “something went wrong” alert.
On the first visit, contractors are diagnosing the yard, choosing where to place hardware, and configuring programs—often while answering rapid‑fire homeowner questions.
Key finding: Most installers used informal maps and photos that never made it into a durable record, making future service work fragile and slow.
The handoff moment is emotionally charged: homeowners are excited, but also anxious about “messing something up.”
Key finding: Handoff was inconsistent and highly dependent on the individual installer; homeowners often forgot what they’d been told within a week.
Over time, real life happens: plants change, kids play, pets dig, weather shifts, and neighbors complain.
Key finding: Without a shared property record, every service call started from scratch—costing time, money, and credibility.
These insights reframed Oasis from “an app to control a device” into a shared property record and service surface: a place where setup, handoff, and ongoing changes could be captured once and reused many times.
Make it easy to do the right thing once—and never lose it.
Contractors think in terms of jobs and properties, not devices. Oasis needed to make the property—not the controller—the primary object in the system.
Installers wanted guardrails, not scripts. We focused on lightweight, guided flows that still respected on‑site improvisation.
The handoff conversation consistently predicted long‑term satisfaction. We treated it as its own experience, not an afterthought.
Every time information was captured once and reused—from zone labels to photos—future calls became faster and less emotional.
People wanted to feel in control without fear of breaking the system. Simple, reversible actions and clear language were non‑negotiable.
Accurate property data unlocks future offerings (maintenance plans, diagnostics, recommendations). The UX had to make good data entry feel natural.
— Owner, regional irrigation business
Designing for setup, handoff, and “help me” moments from a single source of truth.
From our research, I distilled three experience pillars that guided every design decision:
The Oasis UX framework tied every screen back to three pillars: property record, handoff, and service.
These pillars provided a clear lens for prioritizing features and flows. If a request didn’t improve the property record, the handoff, or a service moment, it moved down the roadmap.
With the strategy in place, I partnered with product and engineering to define and prototype three signature experiences that would make or break Oasis: first‑time setup, homeowner handoff, and ongoing monitoring.
1. First‑Time Property Setup
We started by designing a guided property setup flow optimized for a contractor standing in a driveway with a phone in one hand.
The setup flow helps contractors capture just enough structure in the moment—without slowing them down.
2. Designed Handoff: “Here’s Your Yard in Oasis”
Next, we built a dedicated handoff experience that turns raw setup data into a homeowner‑friendly story.
We tested early prototypes with real homeowners. Many said it was the first time they truly understood their system.
“Before this, I was scared to touch the controller. Now I know exactly what to do if I’m out of town.”
— Homeowner, Oasis pilot
The handoff view reframes technical detail into a simple, reassuring summary for homeowners.
3. Ongoing Monitoring & Service
Finally, we designed a lightweight monitoring view for contractors that made support calls faster and more predictable.
A portfolio‑level view helps contractors prioritize which properties need attention—before homeowners even call.
Across all three experiences, I partnered closely with engineering to align interaction patterns with technical constraints and future services. Prototypes in Figma and Protopie were used for stakeholder reviews, contractor pilots, and early engineering spikes.
— Oasis pilot contractor
A foundation for connected residential services—not just a single app.
Even in its early pilot phase, Oasis demonstrated clear value for both contractors and homeowners. By turning scattered artifacts into a shared property record, we reduced friction at every stage of the relationship.
Designing Oasis wasn’t just about one release—it was about establishing a pattern for how residential experiences should work across future controllers, sensors, and services. The information architecture, flows, and visual system created for Oasis now form the basis for other connected‑home initiatives.
As Oasis evolves, there are clear next steps:
To make sure Oasis keeps getting better with every release, we instrumented the experience with Mixpanel and Sprig. Mixpanel tracks how contractors and homeowners actually move through key flows—setup, handoff, and ongoing adjustments—so we can see where they succeed, stall, or drop off. Sprig adds in‑product surveys and quick intercept studies, giving us qualitative signal at the exact moment users are making decisions.
Together, these tools create a perpetual feedback loop: behavioral data highlights where to look, Sprig explains why, and design iterations can be measured against real changes in adoption, task completion, and satisfaction.
For me as a designer, Oasis was a chance to take everything I’d learned from large‑scale, professional platforms and apply it to everyday homes—bridging the gap between pro‑grade capability and consumer‑grade simplicity.
