Product Designer + Researcher • IoT Product • 3 Months
Team
1 Founder, 1 Software Engineer, 2 designer (🙋♀️ me), 2 Researcher(🙋♀️ me)
Overview
The Lasso Machine is a home recycling appliance that lets households recycle and sell materials while boosting efficiency and recovery rates. To maximize its value, users needed a simple way to monitor and control the machine. The Lasso App was created to bridge that gap, making recycling easier, smarter, and more rewarding.
1
Discovery
Competitor Analysis + Interviews + Survey
We Researched for:
We Used:
We concluded three design tenets:
Make simplicity design with minimal interaction
Integrate Pervasive Educational Elements
Motivate users through showing impacts
Design Process
From Research to Product
Design Solutions
Home: Appliance Status & Recycle History
Clear Hierarchy + Minimal Interaction
💡Users need a low-effort way to check machine status so they know exactly when it’s ready to recycle. “I just want to know when it’s ready to recycle and what do I need to do. I don’t have time to play around with it.”
👍The home screen surfaces appliance status, indicating whether it’s connected and ready to load. No phone input is required. Users interact only with the appliance, and the status updates automatically in the app.
Real-Time Machine Feedback
The app passively reflects the appliance’s state during bottle loading, using machine signals to surface only the most relevant information at the right moment.
✅ Bottle loaded successfully
Container & Pick-up Scheduling
Business Needs vs. Users' Needs
👍 To account for edge cases where users may want to clear the Lasso machine before containers are nearly full, pickup scheduling is also available in the Settings page.
Contextual Eco Education
Eco Education in Everyday Moments
💡 Users care about environmental knowledge, but don’t have time for lectures.
👍 We included an on-demand scanning feature to help users identify recyclable materials in everyday life.
👍 Because AI recognition improves with real-world data, we added a feedback loop that lets users correct errors while helping engineers retrain the model.
Learning Through Container Insights
👍 Material details are surfaced when users check containers, with a call to action to scan items in real life for clarity.
Learning While Using the Machine
Impact Is Why Users Love Lasso
Motivation With Minimal Interaction
💡 Research showed low interest in gamification and a strong preference for minimal interactions and outcome-driven value: financial, environmental, or community.
👍 We surface key milestones tied to these outcomes through lightweight notifications, with a single call to action to explore the Impact page in more detail, without adding friction to the core user flow.
Three Motivations, One Experience
💡 Financial return, environmental impact, and community contribution are the three primary reasons users engage with the Lasso machine.
👍 We present trend graphs across these three dimensions and allow users to interact with the one they care about most.
I’m in the back row on the right.
