#41 UX of emptying dyson dust bin

Dyson is one of the most popular brands in home vacuum cleaner category. I’ve been a Dyson customer for the past decades. The model that we currently use in our household is called “dyson cinetic big ball animal +”. It’s the one without washable filters. Overall, I highly respect Dyson as a company, as a brand, who innovated the product category by introducing bag-less vacuum that didn’t lose a suction power.

According to Dyson, 

“It is so efficient it captures the dust that blocks cyclones and clog filters, so it doesn’t lose suction.”

Still I get frustrated whenever I clean up the dust bin.

Why?

Because I feel like I can never get rid of all the dust inside the cyclone!

Obviously, a large chunk of dust that fills up the bin can easily be removed when you detach the dust bin, open the lid and drop the dust collected.

The plastic bin itself is good.

It’s detachable from the cyclone, and you can actually wash it with water.

But the problem is, the cyclone part itself.

When you use a brush to scrape off dust, and tap on the cyclone to get the dust out from the inside, the dust keeps falling down and it never seems to stop.

Because the dust particles are so tiny, it seems that millions of dust particles are sitting inside the cyclone at all times which never seem to clear.

Those may not be clogging the cyclone because each dust particle is so tiny, and the cyclone may still be working fine, but the fact that all these particles never seem to go away kind of bothers me.

I wish that dyson comes up with a way to clean its own cyclone itself, potentially by reversing the direction from suction to blowing mode so that it can get out all the tiny dust particles out of its cyclone system, for example.

The idea of a machine having its own cleaning mode is nothing new.

We see those in dishwashers, ovens, juicers and so on. 

An air pump to inflate an air mattress for camping has a reverse mode to deflate the mattress too.

The same concept could potentially be applied to a vacuum cleaner.

I know that this could be a big challenge to do in a vacuum cleaner because if you activate it by accident, it will be a disaster, spreading all the tiny dust into the room.

But it’s an interesting problem to solve.

Maybe it comes with a special cleaning bin that you can attach the vacuum hose onto, and only after securely attaching the special cleaning bin, a cleaning mode can be activated to blow out dust inside the cyclone to the cleaning bin.

The cleaning bin should be a simple bin that you can wash with water.

Now this might be adding another extra hardware piece.

And I’m not an engineer, so I don’t know if this is even possible from a technical point of view.

But it might be worth it if it works well.

Or they might be already working on it. Who knows?

If they solve this problem, I will be a lot happier!

As a UX designer, especially if you primarily work on digital products, it’s an interesting exercise to think about UX problems that we experience on a physical product like this.

This may seem like a trivial thing, but when you think about the end to end user experience of a vacuum cleaner, cleaning the bin, cleaning the vacuum itself is part of that larger end to end user experience.

In a way, its kind of ironical if a vacuum cleaner which is meant to clean things cannot clean itself.


Check out YouTube version too.

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