Husqvarna

UX Lead · 2016–2020 · Physical HMI and mobile app

One connected mower experience, on the machine and away from it.

A multi-year product-design effort to make autonomous mower status, scheduling, control and recovery coherent across a physical interface and companion app.

RoleUX Lead

ScopeResearch, interaction, prototyping

Timeline3.5 years

Relevant for: IoT & HMI · Complex hardware UX · Field research

01 · Product constraint

Outdoors changes what “usable” means.

The product had to serve first-time homeowners and experienced groundskeepers across multiple mower families. Direct sunlight, wet hands, gloves, partial attention and safety-critical errors made a conventional screen-first approach insufficient.

The central design question became: which information and actions must stay on the machine, and which become easier when they move to a phone?

Hardware

Tactile operation, long product lifecycles and limited display space.

Environment

Sunlight, weather, distance and interrupted attention.

User range

Simple defaults for consumers; enough context for professional work.

Designer holding a mower while reviewing early interface work — Early prototyping kept the physical product in the room.

Research in the environment of use

Stakeholder workshops surfaced engineering and portfolio constraints. Field sessions then tested assumptions with homeowners and professional users around setup, daily operation and error recovery. The work combined moderated and unmoderated studies across 16 participants and 32 sessions.

16: Research participants
32: Test sessions

02 · Alignment

A shared model before a shared visual style.

Workshops with product, engineering, sales and field teams established common terms for mower states, tasks and constraints. That model allowed the HMI and app to feel related without forcing identical controls onto different surfaces.

Cross-functional team presenting a workflow in a Husqvarna showroom — Product and engineering constraints were made visible early.

Team mapping a customer journey with notes on a wall — Journey mapping connected mower states to user decisions.

03 · Physical HMI

Status first. Recovery close behind.

The physical interface prioritised the current mower state and a few essential commands. Scheduling and errors used plain language, high contrast and patterns that could be understood with a brief glance.

Hand using the rotary control and physical buttons on a Husqvarna mower — **Tactile certainty**Large, distinct controls kept essential park and pause actions available outdoors and with gloves.

Mower display showing the current mowing state, cutting height and active area — **Glanceable status**The home state answers the first question—what is the mower doing—before showing secondary settings.

Weekly timer displayed as horizontal schedules for each day — **A visible weekly pattern**A linear schedule makes repetition and gaps easier to scan than a stack of time fields.

Error screen explaining that the mower was lifted and how to resume — **Recovery in plain language**The error names the condition, gives a physical recovery step and keeps the required PIN entry in context.

04 · Companion app

The phone extends the product; it does not mirror it.

The app took on tasks that benefited from a larger canvas, location context or remote access. Three representative flows show the product logic more clearly than the complete screen inventory.

Automower Connect smart scheduling flow shown with a phone in a garden

Flow 1

Plan

Translate recurring mower behaviour into a schedule people can check and adjust away from the machine.

Automower Connect remote controls for starting, pausing and parking

Flow 2

Act remotely

Expose a small set of high-confidence commands, with the mower’s current state visible before action.

Automower Connect intelligent zoning flow with a phone and mapped garden

Flow 3

Manage space

Use the garden as the model so obstacles and zones feel spatial instead of becoming abstract settings.

05 · Field validation

Outdoor research session with a homeowner and a Husqvarna mower — Field sessions introduced sunlight, distance, gloves and divided attention.

What the field work changed

Status became more prominent. Participants repeatedly oriented themselves by asking what the mower was doing now.
Terminology became more direct. Revised labels produced fewer observed hesitations in subsequent sessions.
Consumer and professional views diverged. The former needed clearer defaults; the latter needed denser operational context.
Physical use changed target sizing. Controls were reviewed with outdoor operation and gloves in mind.

These are qualitative findings from the documented sessions. The available project material does not support a quantified claim about onboarding, retention or task-time improvement.

Contribution

A durable interaction model across two surfaces.

I led product design across research synthesis, interaction concepts, prototypes, workshop facilitation and field validation. The work connected hardware constraints with mobile capabilities over a 3.5-year programme.

Reflection

Prototype with the product sooner.

Earlier involvement of professional users would have clarified the need for denser operational views sooner. More frequent physical prototypes at the start would also have reduced later HMI iterations. Both lessons now shape how I plan connected-product work.