From the last paragraph.
This is really cool, thanks! I’m excited for the results 
Hi there, just completed the survey, and some extra feedback:
Clearly you didn’t read the announcement.
Somewhat related to this (as well as the 2024 year-end roadmap update blog post) is that have previously seen that Annika also posted a less formal forum thread with an open question to the community about Best Practices for a Private Smart Home So recommend that anyone interested in providing suggestions and feedback also that check out that thread too here:
As I interpret her post there, I believe she is asking us to reply in that thread with our lists of both general and specific best practices you would recommend that everyone should try to follow in order to better protect their digital privacy when about begin with a totally new smart home setup from scratch without having to reuse any legacy components, and as such specifically targeting a proposed scenario where someone who is planning to move to a new house/apartment, so I assume that means starting from a clean slate that lacks constraints imposed by prior smart home solutions that person may have, (which in technical jargon/terminology is commonly referred to as a greenfield project).
Don’t worry—we’ll only share aggregated and summarized insights from the responses. In the free-text answers, we’re looking at overall patterns and themes, not sharing anything word-for-word.
Indeed 
Holy moly! I am happy and eager to contribute to a survey about HA… But this thing is a BEAST. I finally gave up half way through. WAAYYYYYYYY too many questions!
Just going to flag that this question is just ambiguous enough that I wouldn’t trust the responses. Does build ESPhome firmware mean you’re manually compiling the source code (presumably due to customizations), or does it simply refer to running through the (quite simple) compile YAML + download?
I assumed it meant “wrote your yaml files and compiled it” vs things like apollo or ratgdo where you download the file and just run it.
Thanks for running this survey! It took me 25 min to complete. I’m a slow reader.
Big survey but hey it’s the least I can do…
That’s nothing to do with WTH. I will not open a wth “I think about using voice assistant in the future”. Should I? 
Youre repeating “this is not what the survey is about”. Im repeating “I think these questions do belong to the goals of the survey”. Looks like a Loop.
If you can tell me WHY this does not (from your pov) belong to the survey, this might be a step.
The survey, as I understand it, is about where user currently ARE in their smart home journey, not about where they want to take their smart home. They need to know where the majority of users responding are before they can understand where they want to go in the future.
I question that I think was missing is a free form input for suggesting additional potential questions to be considered for use in any future surveys.
My read is they are trying to get different indications of the diversity of their users so they can work on broadening the appeal.
Like if it is all “Tech dudes” then there is opportunities for expansion.
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Home Assistant should market to service technicians more and create more marketable things or direct attention to the ability to have service technicians already looking for something to do in someone’s house set up home assistant.
THE HOME ASSISTANT
SERVICE TECHNICIAN
INCENTIVE PROGRAM
Then when the service technicians don’t know what to do you hire us forum dwellers to talk them through it.
Let me know where to send my resume
Somewhere in the middle of the survey I was asked if I understand English 
we are asked things like whether we consider the community a welcoming place (forgot the exact wording). there’s no follow-up on those type of questions however, so my guess is no lessons learned there. Or understanding…
I like that you added an “if” there to soften reality a bit
Let’s face it: at least the forum IS 90%+ “tech dudes”, with all pros and especially cons.
We would massively profit from a more diverse user base
Says me, a tech dude
The blog post tells you why they have this survey. I haven’t been speaking from my point of view, I’ve been speaking from the intentions of the blog post. Sometimes things won’t be exactly what you want, you don’t need to announce that on every blog post.
Is anyone else finding the survey just loads as a blank white page? It seems there might be some elements on the page, but they’re completely invisible.
I get the little HA icon and progress bar show up, then it just renders as white on white. No text is selectable so I can’t see what it says that way either. Looking at the DOM tree, it seems that there’s some elements missing.
Environment: Firefox 133.0.3 (64-bit) on Debian Sid, with the ublockorigin addon. Disabling ublockorigin didn’t seem to help.
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Strongly agree with this. There were a few ESPHome questions - I answered in the manner in which I tried to infer the questions were intended but there was some ambiguity.
I didn’t notice any of that, I used an iPhone (ios18.xx) w/ chrome.
Questions render correctly on Win10/FF as well.
All-in-all, a very nice survey! A bit longer but I didn’t mind - it’s a very minor investment of time to give back in a way.
There was a section that felt like it was repeating. Somewhere in the second half there were questions about our motivation for picking up HA but a bunch of similar questions came up early on in the survey. Perhaps good to review that for future surveys (next year :P).
A section on what we find most jarring / highest-friction would be good as well (i.e. if we could fix ONE thing with current resources, what would it be) as well as a section on any moonshot ideas we’d have (i.e. disregarding budget/resources/feasibility, what is ONE thing you’d love to see done).
Also, would be good to make it clear if you can stop part way and still have the answers you provided be useful. I personally didn’t mind the length of the survey but I know some people will - it’s a lot.
Great job to the survey designers and I’m looking fwd to reading what you glean from the data.
Happy Holidays all! 
done. happy holoidays
Conversation.
“Ok Nabu, can you let my partner/wife/husband/girlfriend/child know I’ll be late today?”
Response: “No problem! Sending him/her/them a notification now. Would you like me to also notify him/her/them when you start traveling home?”
Correct,
There seems to be a large number of specialists in this field here on the forum who know exactly what they would like to answer.
So obviously the wrong questions were asked.
Quite logical thinking
Such a useful and very brave decision. Thanks for sharing.
I hope the HA crowd has learned their part.
Survey well done… Look forward to data. Will you abstract “opinions”?
As a Very Old Home Automation guy I thought the technically oriented questions were well done. No questions about Altair, Apple or IBM PC based systems though…
Regards, Terry King
…In The Woods In Vermont
The one who dies with the most Parts LOSES! WHAT DO YOU NEED??
Just guessing, but perhaps some preparations to include this in TTS, so that HA responces won’t offend some members of our community addressing them as he/she?
WTH - I was in the middle of the survey late last night and decided to finish it today, but all the text from my previous answers under “Other” is gone!
The problem with pronouns (or actually, with people) is that some people feel less welcome when they aren’t asked for them, and others feel less welcome when they are.
There are plenty of languages that don’t have gendered pronouns at all. That’s one less thing to argue about, but I trust people who speak those languages will find something else to be offended by.
“My smart home is built with consideration for the lifespan of devices to promote sustainability.” What does that mean?
Does it mean “i don’t buy cheap alix crap for my smart home because it breaks all the time and that’s bad for the environment”? Or does it mean “my home is smart so my devices last longer and that’s good for the environment”
Snap Bro that was my coment beck to them…
When interpreting the answers to questionnaires, an essential assumption is that all respondents are answering the same question, otherwise your data gathering is useless. I may care about lifespan but not about sustainability. Or the other way around. A piece of housing made of alumin(i)um will last longer than plastic but will take a lot more energy to make.
I think it is good for the usefulness of the survey if the OP can clarify this question and others that have been unclear to posters in this thread.
While not using poorly-made devices with crappy build-quality that will break regardless sooner rather than later even if used as intended also promote sustainability in one way I personally believe that this question instead refers to devices that somehow depend on cloud services.
At least I think that if an IoT product in any way (directly or indirectly) depend on a cloud service in any way to be installed, configured and/or to work as it was design then that device can not be said to 100% promote sustainability, and that indirectly also includes devices that require a specific app for configuration too.
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Good point. And yet another argument for further clarifying the question.
I stopped filling it out part way. When it went away from Home Assistant relative questions, it became just noise.
Just know that these surveys can be used to send a company down a path that a small amount of users want and not what is good for the company. One person could hire a company to fill out thousands of these, how they want. Be careful where you are pointed when the dust settles.
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Especially when the most paranoid persons on here stop filling out the survey mid-way and then complain when their voices aren’t heard… Just saying if you re-read what you did and what you warn against, there is a pretty interesting cognitive dissonance there.
I won’t say that I’m yaml challenged. But I can say that I don’t like yaml. Therefore I prefer the GUI over yaml. The GUI is getting better over time, but it is still difficult to make more complex automations. I prefer real programming languages to do that. Hence pyscript.
On the pyscript wiki are some awsome examples comparing yaml versus pyscript:
Example yaml automation:
Seems worthwhile. It’s not necessarily about the smart home itself, but building the community.- alias: some automation
trigger:
platform: state
entity_id: binary_sensor.test
to: "on"
condition:
condition: template
value_template: "{{ is_state('input_boolean.test', 'on') }}"
action:
- service: homeassistant.turn_on
entity_id: switch.test
Pyscript version:
@state_trigger('binary_sensor.test == "on"')
@state_active('input_boolean.test == "on"')
def turn_on():
switch.test.turn_on()
Yeah it took me about an hour. The more detailed you get, the longer it drags on. An option for a shortened version would be nice. I didn’t see anything like that in it either.
It’s not a big deal, it’s only part of my survey feedback, for what it’s worth; event if it’s pejoratively adjudicated to triggering.
English is not everbody’s first language and jargon even less so. I’m colour blind and clicked neurodivergent:yes. In the next question I saw my reading of the term to be clearly different from yours. So I clicked and that was it. I won’t bother again.
One of the first and most important rules in web design established by Tim Berners-Lee himself before 1996 was and is “Do not break the back button!” You should be banned from writing for the web ever again.
I clicked “back” and that was it. In the post I enclosed “back” in angle brackets and this interface just made it vanish. Not nice.
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these buttons go forward backward in questions.
Also keep in mind, the poll questions were created by Nabu Casa, not the poll software. There may be a way to provide feedback to typeform on their website.
Locking, nothing good is coming from this conversation.