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
Toro dominates professional irrigation. The residential market was a different story.
Toro's professional platforms are trusted to run some of the most complex irrigation systems in the world—stadiums, golf courses, and commercial landscapes. But when it came to residential properties, the experience was stuck in a pre-digital era. Contractors were stitching together phone photos, paper notes, controller manuals, and text messages just to manage a single property.
There was no single source of truth for "what's in the yard." No structured handoff. No shared context between the contractor who installed it and the homeowner who lived with it. The result: callbacks, confusion, and a contractor experience that felt nothing like the "modern service business" they wanted to be.
Toro Oasis was conceived as a unifying layer between contractors, connected controllers, and homeowners—a platform where properties, devices, and programs could live together in a way that felt intuitive, resilient, and ready to scale.
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. Nobody had a tool designed for both.
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 rapid‑fire 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're away.
Without a dedicated platform, this gap showed up everywhere:
Details lived in installers' heads, photos on phones, and stickers on controller faceplates. When a different crew showed up, they started from scratch.
Homeowners called back within a month because they forgot the ad-hoc verbal walkthrough. Every schedule change meant another text thread.
Phone photos, paper notes, controller manuals, text messages, and email—none of them connected, none of them durable.
Before Oasis, contractors stitched together photos, paper, and controller UIs to manage each property—resulting in inconsistency, callbacks, and lost context.
We designed Oasis from real user data, not the conference room.
To ground the product in reality, I partnered with product and sales to understand contractors and homeowners in context. We interviewed users, analyzed beta session replays, mined support call transcripts, and tracked every tap through Mixpanel to see where people actually struggled.
Three primary personas emerged from the research—each with fundamentally different needs, tools, and emotional states:
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 designed 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.
Three flows that make or break the platform—designed from real constraints, not conference-room assumptions.
We started by designing a guided property setup flow optimized for a contractor standing in a driveway with a phone in one hand and a truck full of parts behind them.
We chose progressive disclosure over a single long form. Contractors capture the property card first, then add zones and fixtures, then pair controllers—each step saveable independently in case Wi-Fi drops.
Contractors told us they lose signal mid-setup regularly. A flow that required completion to save would lose data constantly. Each step saves state and can be resumed.
The setup flow helps contractors capture just enough structure in the moment—without slowing them down.
The handoff is the emotional peak of the contractor-homeowner relationship. We built a dedicated experience that turns raw setup data into a homeowner‑friendly story—no more ad-hoc verbal walkthroughs that get forgotten in a week.
We reframed the handoff from "explaining the system" to "showing the homeowner what's protected." Visual property summary, simple pause/skip controls, and clear alert expectations.
In testing, homeowners who received the designed handoff were 2× more likely to say they "fully understand" their system. The handoff moment predicts long-term satisfaction.
The handoff view reframes technical detail into a simple, reassuring summary for homeowners.
A property doesn't end at handoff. We designed a lightweight monitoring view for contractors that made support calls faster and more predictable—turning reactive "panic texts" into proactive, planned adjustments.
Portfolio-level status indicators (healthy, attention, offline) let contractors prioritize across dozens of properties at a glance. Shared activity history means both parties always see the same information.
Without shared context, every service call started from scratch. With it, a 20-minute call becomes a 5-minute adjustment—saving money and preserving credibility.
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
From fragmented artifacts to a shared, structured platform.
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 at Toro.
As Oasis evolves, there are clear next steps:
Lessons from bridging pro-grade capability with consumer-grade simplicity.
The most impactful decisions came from watching session replays—seeing users hesitate, back-tap, and abandon flows mid-setup. No amount of whiteboarding substitutes for observing real behavior in real time.
The moment a contractor hands a system to a homeowner predicts the entire relationship. Treating it as a designed experience—not a checklist—changed everything.
Contractors won't fill out forms. But they will name zones, snap photos, and label fixtures if it's embedded in the workflow. Good data entry has to be a byproduct, not a task.
Every IA decision, naming convention, and data model was made with future devices and services in mind. Designing for "Oasis 1.0" while architecting for "Oasis 5.0" was the constant tension.
We didn't ship and hope—we shipped and watched every tap.
During beta, we built a full observability stack using Mixpanel and Sprig to create a real‑time feedback engine. Every screen, every button tap, every drop‑off was instrumented—giving us complete visibility into how contractors and homeowners actually moved through setup, handoff, and ongoing adjustments.
Full event tracking across every flow—session starts, setup completion, controller connections, zone configurations. Custom dashboards tracked daily active users, contractor vs. homeowner splits, and funnel conversion from first app open to signup (1.41% in early beta—a clear signal we needed to simplify onboarding).
Session replays let us watch real users navigate the app in real time. We spotted choke points we never would have caught in usability testing—hesitation on the zone naming screen, confusion around controller pairing, and repeated back‑taps during the setup wizard. These weren't guesses; they were patterns across dozens of sessions.
We connected Mixpanel's MCP server directly into our AI‑assisted design workflow, letting us query engagement data, pull funnel breakdowns, and surface behavioral anomalies in context while making design decisions—no tab‑switching, no export‑and‑paste. Data informed design in real time.
Targeted micro‑surveys deployed at critical decision moments—right after setup completion, after first schedule adjustment, and at 7‑day retention checkpoints. Qualitative signal told us why users behaved the way the data showed.
The result: A perpetual feedback loop where behavioral data highlights where to look, session replays show what happened, Sprig explains why, and design iterations can be measured against real changes in adoption, task completion, and satisfaction—all without leaving the design environment.
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.
