The Craftsman brand of tools have been around since 1927. Originally owned by Sears Holding, Craftsman is now owned by Stanely Black & Decker. With the new ownership came other more modern changes, including the introduction of smart features to some of their tools and gear that give consumers even more controls over the tools of their trade.
Craftsman was preparing to launch a new line of Bluetooth-connected smart riding mowers and needed a companion mobile app to bring the product to market. The goal was to give consumers meaningful control over their mower while ensuring it stayed well-maintained — all through an experience approachable enough for first-time smart-equipment owners and those who had never used a connected device before.
I was brought in as the sole product designer, tasked with translating early hardware engineering specs and brand guidelines into a shippable product. Using a mock battery from the mower, I led a development team in building the foundation of the app — starting with how the mower's power data would be captured and communicated to users. From those data points, I developed Figma pages and dashboards that translated technical battery information into a clear, digestible experience. I moved from paper prototypes to high-fidelity Figma mocks, then tested the designs with 8 participants across two moderated usability rounds. Key decisions that emerged from this process included a persistent dashboard widget for engine hours, a single-tap maintenance log, and a streamlined Bluetooth pairing flow built from the ground up to be as intuitive as possible.
The app launched on time across both iOS and Android, giving users a comprehensive view of their mower's health — from battery status and oil change intervals to knowing exactly when to swap out mower blades. The release received strong early reviews, with praise centered on the ease of pairing and the maintenance reminder flow, the exact two areas our research had flagged as highest priority. The product team credited the usability-test findings as the primary driver behind fast-tracking the pairing experience for engineering re-prioritization.
From JPGs to a Working App
The project kicked off with a folder of engineering screenshots and a PDF brand guide. My first task was translating those constraints into user flows that accounted for Bluetooth latency, intermittent connectivity, and the reality that most users would be operating their phone with one hand while on a mower.
I ran two rounds of paper prototyping before moving into Figma — a deliberate choice to keep early iterations cheap and to surface navigation assumptions before any pixels were committed. The key insight from round one: users expected maintenance alerts to appear on a home-screen widget, not buried inside the app.
The One-Stop App Any Lawn Care User Needs
The shipped product consolidated pairing, diagnostics, maintenance scheduling, and dealer locator into a single, five-tab architecture — a structure that emerged from, rather than preceded, the research. Navigation was validated against a card-sort with 15 participants before implementation, which surfaced one critical misalignment: users didn't mentally group "dealer locator" with service history until they understood they could pull up their own maintenance records on-site during a service appointment. That insight reframed the tab from a simple map utility into a service-continuity feature.
The four core feature areas each carried their own design constraints:
- Real-time engine diagnostics (RPM, fuel, oil pressure, engine hours) required a display hierarchy that communicated urgency without crying wolf. Most readings are nominal most of the time, so the default state needed to feel calm and glanceable — while critical values still needed to interrupt attention immediately. I used color and positional weight rather than modal alerts to create that gradient of urgency.
- Push notification maintenance reminders — oil change, air filter, blade sharpening — were the most behaviorally sensitive surface in the app. The paper prototyping rounds made clear that users would ignore in-app alerts but act on home-screen notifications. The final system tied reminder triggers to engine hours logged rather than calendar intervals, which matched how owners actually track wear on equipment they don't use on a fixed schedule.
- The 4-step Bluetooth pairing flow was pressure-tested against the single-hand use case from the start. Every tap target, every confirmation screen, and every error state was evaluated assuming the user's other hand wasn't available. The flow also had to degrade gracefully under Bluetooth latency and dropped connections — states that aren't edge cases in an outdoor, RF-noisy environment.
- Dealer locator with service-record integration closed the loop between the user's in-app maintenance history and their nearest service provider. Rather than a standalone map, it surfaced relevant context — last service date, outstanding alerts — at the moment a user was deciding whether to bring the equipment in.
Impact & Reflections
The Craftsman Smart Lawn app shipped on schedule across both iOS and Android, earning a 4.6-star launch rating driven largely by praise around the pairing experience and maintenance reminder flow — the two areas our research had flagged as highest priority from the start. Internal dealer research reported a 40% increase in connected-device engagement compared to the previous season's manual-only owners, validating the decision to prioritize approachability for first-time smart-equipment users.
The maintenance tracking features resonated particularly well, with owners actively using the app to monitor engine hours, oil change intervals, and blade wear rather than relying on guesswork or paper manuals. The single-tap maintenance log and persistent dashboard widget — both decisions that came directly out of usability testing — proved to be the features users referenced most in early reviews.
If I were to revisit this project, I would have pushed for analytics instrumentation earlier in the process. Post-launch, we were working with aggregate dealer data rather than in-app behavioral funnels, which made it difficult to validate design assumptions at a granular level and slowed down the prioritization of v2 features. We knew the app was performing well broadly, but we couldn't pinpoint exactly where users were succeeding or dropping off within specific flows. That gap directly shaped how I now approach instrumentation planning — making it a fixed part of every project brief rather than an afterthought after launch.
A commercial for the Smart Lawn App produced by Sears back in 2017 when the app launched.
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Senior Product Designer