A full end-to-end redesign of two core digital touchpoints for the leading DIY carpet cleaning rental brand in the United States: a customer-facing in-store kiosk and a back-office admin panel, built to serve millions of users and the operations team running the fleet behind the scenes.
My Role:
Lead UI/UX Designer
Kiosk · Admin Panel
01
RugDoctor is the leading DIY carpet cleaning rental brand in the United States, with machines available at over 35,000 retail locations including Walmart, Kroger, The Home Depot, and Dollar General. The project encompassed a full redesign of two deeply connected but very different digital surfaces: a customer-facing kiosk interface used on the retail floor, and a back-office admin panel used by RugDoctor's operations team to monitor machine status, manage inventory, and track rental activity across all locations nationwide.
02
The existing kiosk flow was losing customers mid-transaction. Confusing navigation, unclear progress, and a poorly executed upsell experience were driving abandoned rentals and frustrating first-time users at the point of greatest intent. On the operations side, the admin panel lacked the clarity and density needed for a team managing a nationwide fleet in real time. Regional managers had no reliable, at-a-glance view of fleet status, active rentals, or service alerts, making fast decisions unnecessarily difficult.
03
The approach treated the kiosk and the admin panel as two distinct design problems united by a single brand language. For the kiosk, the goal was a frictionless rental flow completable in under five taps, with accessibility, plain-language instructions, and clear progress indicators at the centre of every screen decision. For the admin panel, the goal was scannable data density, real-time status communication, and fast access to the actions most frequently performed during a shift. Both surfaces were rebuilt from the ground up, wireframed separately, and validated through usability testing before final design.
The visual foundation was built around RugDoctor's signature red (#E8201A), used for primary actions, brand elements, and status alerts throughout both interfaces. Neutral grays provide structural hierarchy across the kiosk and admin panel, ensuring high legibility on backlit touchscreen displays and standard desktop monitors alike. Two typefaces were selected for clarity and brand alignment: a display sans-serif for headlines, kiosk screen titles, and promotional copy, conveying approachability without sacrificing authority, paired with a clean, high-legibility body typeface optimised for reading at varying distances on a touchscreen. A unified icon set was created to support both interfaces, extending the brand language into functional UI elements with consistent stroke weight and optical sizing, reading clearly at small dashboard sizes and large touch-target sizes on the kiosk screen.
The redesigned kiosk interface replaced the legacy flow with a streamlined, high-contrast rental experience built for the retail floor. A complete set of screens was designed to cover the full rental lifecycle: welcome and machine browsing, add-on selection, identity verification, payment, rental confirmation, active rental status, and machine return.
Impact
The project produced two fully redesigned digital products, a kiosk interface and an admin panel, unified under a coherent, scalable design system. The kiosk redesign demonstrably reduced abandoned transactions and improved add-on attachment rates in user testing. The admin panel transformed a fragmented operations view into a single, actionable command centre capable of serving a fleet spanning tens of thousands of retail locations nationwide.
Learning
Designing for two radically different contexts within the same product ecosystem reinforced how much surface matters. The kiosk demanded large targets, plain language, and zero cognitive load for a customer who may be using it for the first time in a busy retail environment. The admin panel demanded density, speed, and precision for a professional who needs to act fast. Holding both of these realities together, while maintaining a coherent brand language across them, was the central design challenge, and the most rewarding one.
Takeaway
RugDoctor was a lesson in designing for context over consistency. The best design system is not one that looks the same everywhere, but one that feels right everywhere. Whether a customer renting their first machine at Walmart or an operations manager tracking hundreds of kiosks across the country, the product should feel like it was made exactly for them.
If you're building a product, exploring a new direction, or looking for a senior designer to help shape strategy and execution, reach out.