Sutro Smart Pool Water Monitoring System

A deep dive into improving the Sutro post-purchase and onboarding experience

MY ROLE
UX Researcher, UX/UI Designer

TIMELINE
Nov 2022 | 3 weeks

PLATFORM
Responsive website and cross-platform mobile app – Android and iOS

TEAM
Garrett Lu, Nikhil Sharma, Lorenza Gerber

METHODS
Client research, User Surveys, User Interviews, Affinity Mapping, Usability Testing, Competitive Analysis, User Persona, Problem Statements, Journey Map, Site Map, Tree Testing, Sketching, Wireframing, Prototyping

TOOLS
Figma, Maze, Optimal Workshop, Trello, Slack, Zoom, Google Workspace, Pen & Paper

OVERVIEW

Sutro, a leading pool water monitoring system, has been experiencing higher than expected customer churn rates 1-2 weeks after purchase. As part of understanding why some users are returning their Sutro devices, the company tasked our team to conduct a deep dive into existing data and perform further research to get a full end-to-end understanding of the Sutro post-purchase experience.

With these objectives in mind, our team presented Sutro with several key findings and potential solutions that could address customer pain points. From creating a brand new Resources page on their website to reimagining the Sutro mobile app Help section to restructuring the information architecture of the FAQ, we created a suite of solutions to reduce onboarding questions, minimize churn, and prepare customers for their Sutro experience before they even press the buy button.


Go directly to the iOS mobile app prototype.

Background

01

WHAT IS SUTRO?

As anyone who has ever owned a pool can attest to, testing for water chemistry can be a hassle and is one of the main reasons why many owners hate having a pool. Enter Sutro.

Sutro is an automated pool water testing device that takes consistent measurements 3x per day. It then provides adjustment recommendations to owners directly through the mobile app based on chemical products they already use.

➡

So how does Sutro work? In a nutshell, the Sutro Monitor floats in the pool or spa, taking in a small quantity of water every few hours to conduct a test reading.

A cartridge inside the Sutro Monitor contains testing reagents (the different-colored liquids) that do the actual work of evaluating the pool water – in the same way a manual test kit works.

Each test cartridge typically lasts 30 days, and needs to be replaced by the customer once it has been depleted. As a part of owning their Sutro, customers need to sign up for a monthly subscription service ($29 Basic / $39 Premium), which includes shipments of replacement cartridges as needed.

The Sutro smart pool water monitoring system includes 3 main components – the Sutro mobile app, the Sutro Hub, and the Sutro Monitor + Cartridge:

THE ISSUE

Sutro has been experiencing higher than expected churn rates 1-2 weeks after customers make their purchase.

They suspect that frustrations experienced during the setup and onboarding process may be to blame since the setup procedure can be quite involved, but they don’t know this for a fact.

PROJECT GOALS

Research

02

PMF SURVEY DATA

Sutro currently sends out a Product Market Fit (PMF) survey to customers 2 weeks after onboarding. While the survey questions don’t specifically target the setup and onboarding experience, the resulting data still provided us with a good starting point to benchmark general customer satisfaction and identify important frustrations.

Key Insights:

RMA REFUNDS DATA

A key objective of this project was to identify the reasons behind the higher-than-expected customer churn rates 1-2 weeks after purchase. In order to do that, we requested and analyzed Sutro’s existing Return Merchandise Authorization (RMA) – Refunds data.

Out of 392 returns extracted from Zendesk for the year 2022, we were ultimately able to collate 194 data points with identifiable reasons attached. They are as follows:

Note that “Setup Issues” only accounted for 4.1% of the returns data and by far the biggest reasons for returns were “Inaccurate Readings” and “Connection Issues”.

Is Setup & Onboarding Really the Problem Here?

From what we had discovered so far, there seemed to be other critical issues at play that needed to be investigated further. We decided to dig deeper and conduct additional user research to confirm or refute these findings.

TARGETED USER SURVEY

In order to determine if there really was a problem with the setup and onboarding process, we decided to take a metaphorical scalpel to the issue and precisely target users with a set of questions that were short and to-the-point:

  • Did you encounter any issues when setting up the Sutro?

  • What part of the setup process was the most difficult?

  • What level of difficulty would you rate the in-app instructions to set up the Sutro?

We sent the survey out to more than 700 current Sutro owners, and we received 105 responses back.

Key Insights:

While the vast majority of users had no issues with the setup process and found the in-app setup instructions to be quite easy, we still had about 27% of users who did run into problems. We needed to go further down the funnel to identify these issues and their level of severity.

IN-DEPTH INTERVIEWS

To uncover the problems customers were experiencing during the setup and onboarding process and to determine whether or not they contributed to deeper levels of frustration, we set up in-depth 1-on-1 interviews, specifically targeting survey respondents who experienced issues during setup.

Out of 33 targeted interview requests we sent out, 10 potential participants responded, and we were ultimately able to schedule 4 phone interviews that lasted between 15-30 minutes.

What Users Had To Say:

To our surprise, every single interviewee said that the existing in-app setup instructions were clear and easy to understand. However, we noticed 2 other consistent problems:

  • 3/4 users experienced technical issues related to connecting the Sutro Hub to their Wi-Fi network. And when they tried to find troubleshooting help, they were left stranded.

  • 3/4 users reached out to Sutro’s customer support, and they had to wait days for a response. Even worse, 2/4 users mentioned that Sutro’s phone support didn’t work at all.

WEBSITE USABILITY TEST

Lastly, we conducted 7 moderated usability tests on Sutro’s desktop website to find out how easily users were able to find relevant product details and learn about setup instructions.

Throughout our research, we noticed that many users mentioned how they liked to investigate Sutro on their own prior to buying the product – either through YouTube videos or other pool owners’ forums. We wondered if there was information users needed that wasn’t on Sutro’s website.

We noted that most users had difficulty finding the Sutro setup instructions and help information, which were buried a few layers deep within the FAQ.

Getting Customers the Help They Need When They Need It

Based on the data, it became very clear that the problem wasn’t the onboarding process itself. Rather, the real problem arose when users experienced unexpected technical issues. When they most needed troubleshooting help, they hit a wall.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Defining the Problem

03

CUSTOMER JOURNEY

To help build a complete end-to-end understanding of the customer’s post-purchase experience, we created a journey map to document the potential emotional path of a subset of customers who end up returning their Sutros.

Most importantly, we identified 2 low points where Sutro could potentially help customers recover and get back on track, as seen above highlighted in red.

THE PROBLEM

Insights gained from our research and data helped us define the problems. And having clearly defined problems paved the way for us to ideate for potential solutions.

How might we help users easily access and understand troubleshooting information when they need it so they can avoid waiting for customer support?

How might we help users know before buying the Sutro if the system will fit their specific needs and exactly what it takes to maintain the device?

How might we provide users with the information they need to have confidence that their Sutro test readings are accurate and trustworthy?

How might we give users the ability to customize their Sutro test schedule and purchase test cartridges only when they need it?

Note that while the problems gleaned from Insight #1 were within the original scope of this project, the remaining 2 problems were discovered during our research and were somewhat out of scope. Nevertheless, we decided to address them during our design phase since we believed they represented serious issues raised by a large number of users.

Ideate & Design

04

IDEATING SOLUTIONS

We used the problems defined earlier as a guide for all of our design decisions. While we weren’t limited by the Sutro team in terms of the platforms and flows we could redesign, we were unfortunately limited by a 3-week time restriction. Given this constraint, we decided to focus our energy on realistic and practical ideas that would make the most meaningful impact on customers.

A NEW RESOURCE

We decided that the best way to help both existing and potential customers access information about Sutro was to create a new primary destination called Resources on the website that would contain all the helpful details we felt were currently missing or difficult to find:

A MORE HELPFUL APP

Similarly, we wanted to better surface troubleshooting and help information in the Sutro mobile app to assist users when they run into issues, especially during the setup process.

  • The current Help screen in the Sutro mobile app only contains 2 features – Contact Support and Sutro Chat, neither of which allow for self-service troubleshooting for the customer.

  • In addition, both CTAs immediately direct users to contact Sutro, which increases the burden on the support team and the amount of time it takes to respond to customers.

Instead, let’s see how we can turn this into a real Help section featuring common issues, step-by-step troubleshooting, and links to the FAQ so users can start by helping themselves.

Self-Service Tools to Help Customers Help Themselves

The new Resources page and reimagined Help section are meant to achieve the same goal – provide users with the tools they need to help themselves. Ultimately, this reduces their frustration and eases the burden on Sutro’s customer support team.

FOSTERING TRUST

The second issue we tackled in the Sutro mobile app was the common user complaint that their test readings were inaccurate.

From our discussions with Sutro about this issue, we discovered that immediately after replacing a test cartridge, there may be a 24-48 hour period where test readings could fluctuate as the new cartridge calibrates itself and adjusts to the water chemistry.

These fluctuations could potentially confuse users and cause them to become frustrated with the device and lose trust in future readings. From the RMA – Refunds data, we know that inaccurate readings was by far the most common reason given for returns.

To address this problem, we added a very simple warning message directly on the main screen of the mobile app where test readings are displayed. This warning should appear immediately after the test cartridge is replaced and should remain on the screen for a minimum of 24 hours.

MORE USER CONTROL

The third issue we tackled in the Sutro mobile app was giving users the ability to customize their Sutro test schedule to suit their lifestyle and needs. This was by far the most requested feature that we heard about time and again during the research phase.

Offering this functionality, however, posed a big question to one of the key business propositions of Sutro – does it make sense to do away with the subscription plan? Or at least allow users to opt out of the subscription model and enable test cartridge purchases on a one-off basis?

Clearly, users want to reduce the number of tests performed and in turn, have their cartridges last longer than the standard 30 days in order to minimize costs. However, we noted to the Sutro team that many customers were less than happy about the required subscription and overall cost of ownership.

One of our interviewees even said this:

“I would personally like to test once per day and have the same cartridge last for 3 months. In fact, I think you guys would sell a lot more of these if you got rid of the subscription.”
— Interviewee

Fortunately, the Sutro team was open to the idea and encouraged us to explore design solutions that would facilitate more user control of their Sutro test schedule.

HI-FI PROTOTYPE

Check out the Hi-Fi prototype below! Feel free to explore the new Help section or update the Sutro test schedule. For the test schedule flow, please note that only one possible testing cadence has been prototyped. Select the new test schedule below for the flow to make sense:

  • Every Sunday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday

  • 2x per day

  • Test #1 at 6:00 AM

  • Test #2 at 12:30 PM

Lastly, please note that not all flows and features have been prototyped. Only the new features described in the design sections above have been completed.

Next Steps

05

IMPROVING THE FAQ

During our usability tests in the research phase, we discovered that many users were having difficulty finding the information they needed in the website FAQ. We attributed this to two reasons:

Too many topics were packed into too few top-level categories, and many were buried several layers deep. This made it extremely difficult for users to navigate the FAQ and find what they needed.

Although we didn’t get a chance to do a full redesign of the FAQ given our time constraints, we were able to reorganize the information architecture using a tree test and create a new site map based on the solution of having more top-level categories and fewer topics per category.

We believe this new site map could serve as inspiration for a redesign of the FAQ in the future.

INSTRUCTIONAL VIDEOS

While this would most likely be outside the scope of UX design, we discovered during the research phase that most users would like to learn more about the Sutro system via instructional videos. These videos could be of service to both existing and potential customers.

We recommended to the Sutro team that they create a series of professional videos targeted towards specific tasks like setup, replacing the cartridge and battery, learning about Sutro’s capabilities, shutting down Sutro after the pool season ends, and more.

These videos would be featured on the new Resources page, and could also potentially be integrated into the mobile app as well.

MOBILE APP NAVIGATION

This would be a much longer term project, but one of the things we noticed while working on the mobile app was how unintuitive the overall navigation was. Several of the main menu destinations could be combined under a general Profile or Settings category, and the entire hamburger menu could be replaced by a simple footer navigation bar with 4-5 destinations.

This would allow for quicker navigation, simple single-hand usage of the app, and a cleaner layout.

WIDER TESTING RANGE

A number of users expressed a desire to test for a wider range of chemical parameters. Currently, Sutro tests for pH, free chlorine, bromine, and total alkalinity. Users mentioned that they would also like to see tests for boric acid and cyanuric acid, as well as possible allowances for different mineral systems like AOP or PoolRx.

Of course, these improvements would fall under the purview of the engineering team and would likely have significant technical and budget constraints.