App Improvement suggests

Product Suggestions
1

I’ve been using Rachio for almost 2 years. I love the idea of water conservation. However, the implementation is challenging and parts of my yard are suffering.

I’d like to see several improvements:

  1. The settings are obtuse and their is no user feedback as to what impact making a change will have. Does it increase frequency or duration or both (yes I have read the explanations)? You could easily calculate the impact for the latest daily or monthly weather and provide some feedback. While, the math is technically very accurate, it depends on a lot of assumptions. In reality, people are trying to change duration or frequency by tweaking the settings to keep your landscape alive with the least amount of water and have it adjust for weather and temperature. Please find a way to indicate what the relative change is for each of the settings and provide some feedback so we can dial in our settings (frequency before, after, duration before, after).

  2. The Managed Allowed Depletion and water graph is totally confusing. I would change this to an absolute chart. 100% is saturated, 0% is bone dry (110% or -10% are not possible). Instead of allowed depletion it should be minimum water content (or saturation). So if I set it at 50% then the saturation should cycle between 50 and 100%. If I set it at 40% then it would cycle between 40 and 100 %. What you have now is very confusing. (Do I increase allowed depletion or decrease it to change the saturation content of my yard (yes I read the explanation and I still find it confusing).

  3. I want to be able to see and edit all of my advanced settings in one table for all zones (along with duration and frequency for current month). The menu driven interface is painful and very time consuming for a 16 zone system. It is challenging to compare across zones without keeping records.

These are just a few suggestions to make your user experience better.

2 Likes
2

These are great and I agree would make for a better customer scheduling experience.

@mckynzee @timber @mitchell Can we make sure these get in our backlog?

:cheers:

3

@sw_ck Thank you for the suggestions! We will certainly consider them as we make improvements to the app and experience

For #3. Are you okay only being able to do this on the web?

4

I had a hard time understand the history at first until Chance helped me through the support line.

The icons don’t really make sense to me. If the system is watering use an incon that looks like watering if is is letting water soak in make it a better icon choice like water drops down arrow grass.

As a change manager for technology I think about how my oldest customer will take it in. What will make sense to them. Thoughtful design here would help because I feel I have a decent ability to interpret things.

Also the order with newest event on top is not the normal that many experience.

Logging each event may be too much. Perhaps the icon for watering show start stop time run and soaking start stop time run. One entry for each start stop and time run.

Just suggestions. Love the product.

1 Like
5

Sorry for the long delay getting back. For #3 the web would be fine.