A Little Too Streamlined 🤦‍♂️

I’m not sure if Feature Requests is the right place for this but it was either this or the Community Discussion for the release so I chose this. (PLease let me know if I chose wrong)

The newest update continues HA’s effort of Streamlining Experiences but despite best intentions, I think in some instances the update over-streamlined. In those situations the new streamlining seems to have done the opposite and actually added more steps or complicated a task… but I’m sure that someone has a reason.

The first is in the creation of a new Script. The new streamlined version automatically adds Device as the default Action and I think that’s actually counterproductive for a lot of people. If there were only a couple of possible Actions to choose from or one specific Action that was used more than others then it would make sense to have a default but that’s not the case. There are 14 possible Actions to choose from and I think everyone starts their Script with something different.

I decided to check my own Scripts and I went through more than half of them without finding one Script that started with Device as the first Action. I can’t help to think that it’s probably the same for a lot of other users.

Now in comparison to the new streamlined Scripts, the new streamlined Automations does not have a default so I don’t really understand why Scripts has one… but I’m sure someone has a reason. I think removing the default action of Device and keeping it empty like Automations works best.

My other gripe is after choosing an Action the user can no longer go back and click on it and get a drop-down to choose a different Action. Instead, the user must click the three dots on the right, click Delete, confirm it, and then click Action to choose the new one. What was once one click now turned into multiple clicks which again feels counterproductive to me and opposite of the new Streamlined Experience… but again I’m sure that someone has a reason.

I might as well keep on going so my other gripe is the Reorder function. I can’t recall this ever being an option but I wish I had the ability to “Reorder” the Options within the Choose Action. Sometimes I change them for logical reasons and other times just so they visually make more sense but in order to reorder them, I have to do it in the Yaml view.

Also related to the Reorder function, I’m curious if users like the new drag-and-drop function or prefer the previous arrows. I think I prefer the arrows but I wish the reordered section would have centered or stayed in place on the screen while the other sections moved around it. That would have made changing the order more fluid because in the old version the reordered section would jump to the new location. That was a pain when moving more than one spot because instead of click-click-click it was click-find-click-find-click. The new drag-and-drop eliminates that but past the view of the screen means finding that sweet spot and hoping the screen doesn’t scroll too fast. I also find myself searching for a place to “drop” the section the same way I search for a place to drop the little yellow guy for Google Street View prior to the green lines. Maybe the same way the drag anchor turns red it could turn green instead of staying grey while trying to drop it.

Since I’m on a roll, a streamlined feature for users who use the “Always hide the sidebar” feature is to always keep the top left “hamburger” button visible. On some HA pages, the “hamburger” button gets replaced with a “back-arrow” button. If the sidebar is hidden and this happens then with each page the user navigates to the further they get from the main menu. The user then has to click the “back-arrow” and go back through all the last pages that they were just on until they reach the main settings page. Yes, they could un-hide the sidebar and just minimize it but for the people that hide it (like me) if HA kept the “hamburger” button at the top (just like when the sidebar is minimized) it would really help.

(Sorry but I guess I had too much time on my hands. :man_shrugging:)

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I’m sorry to say that I agree with you, and that nothing has changed since my last post regarding UX from July last year.

Home assistant is very powerful and functional. But it is really lacking in terms of user experience. For that reason I prefer doing everything in code, i.e. only use stuff in .yaml-files. Super easy to move & copy parts, super easy to find, search, replace, and maintain a large config set. Unfortunately for every new release some things in .yaml has been deprecated and moved into the UI only. Also, sometimes completely removing existing behaviour (e.g. making a feature that was possible to set in .yaml not available in the UI, and making the UI the only way to configure it).

To me, Home Assistant was like Linux (command line configurable, flexible, open source) but they have a vision to make the UI more like the later versions of Apple operating systems. Yet what they end up with is windows 95. :slight_smile:

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Have to agree with the above posters.

I also dislike the new automations where I do not see if they’re Single/Restart etc immediately, and to run or it or change the type I have to spend more clicks and dig in the 3 star menu. I have several complicated automations which I now have to click around like madman to unroll all the stuff to see what it actually does because it’s streamlined to the top level if-then and I can’t see anything inside the next sub-levels. I can not find how to change a Condition/Trigger/etc I add into automation without deleting it and adding different one or changing it in yaml.

The reorder function is more confusing than helpful as I can only drag within the block, ie I can’t decide to add new if-then into the automation and then drag existing device row into it, I still have to delete the old device and recreate it inside the if-then.

There’s more, maybe I’m just getting too old and yelling at kids to get off my porch, but why do developers nowadays interchange “streamline” with “dumb down and remove/hide features”.

edit streamlined:
image

what it actually does and what takes lots of clicks to see:

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Because of the “target audience”. It forces the developers to dumb things down for the masses while making it harder for the more advanced users.

They want more people to use HA but then they end up not trusting those users to not screw stuff up causing more support requests on github. So they hide all the advanced stuff behind multiple clicks or removing it altogether.

I think I know the answer but it would be interesting to know how many of the developers actually use the UI to configure everything vs doing it mostly in yaml.

yup, that’s one of the biggest problems.

:laughing:

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Now, now gents. Just a trifle smug, don’t you think? :wink:

But speaking as one of the masses, and a UI user… I have to say that I find the streamlining a little overdone too. I wonder whether it’s just the pace of change I’m reacting to. Do we really need an update every month? I’m starting to skip them if there are no breaking changes.

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Not really. Just stating a fact.

And I’m not generalizing completely about every user who uses the UI. I’m just generalizing about the target audience and the lengths that the developers are going to to try to attract those users who literally don’t want to take the time to learn what it takes to use HA and instead they move inexorably towards making it harder for those who do.

and I’m not completely against any UI based stuff. But there’s got to be a balance.

pandering to the least common denominator to increase your market share eventually makes you just like all the rest of the locked down software products on the market. We don’t need any more of those.

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I would agree if we were talking about some commercial products, but weirdly HA seems to be the opposite.

An open source project is at the mercy of the (unpaid) developers contributing to it - if nobody is interested in a particular aspect of the work, then that doesn’t move forward. I’m sure we all have a couple of favourite examples.

Conversely, if a lot of people are enthusiastic about something like the UI, that’s what gets the attention - and why we get so many updates.

It’s the developers HA has to cater to, not the lowest common denominator among the users.

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But HA actually is a quasi-commercial product. We may not pay directly for HA itself but I’m sure that the cloud subscriptions are bringing in a not-insubstantial amount of money.

How do you think that Nabu Casa employs so many (paid) developers?

I’m not saying that it’s definitely driving development in that direction but I can’t fault the company necessarily for wanting to bring in more paying customers. And bringing in the “masses” is one easy way of doing that. But doing it by making it harder for advanced users by needing to click thru endless layers of menu’s because they don’t want to expose anything that will allow clueless users to break things doesn’t seem right.

Anyone who thinks that HA is not driven by profit at least to some degree doesn’t understand human nature.

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@C.G.B.Spender I love your “old man on the porch” metaphor. I actually felt like that the entire time I was writing the post and kept visualizing @frenck lecturing me about how HA is an open-source project which relies on contributions and that if I don’t like it then I should contribute (I promise I am trying). Lol.

@finity I completely understand this and I don’t think everything is “bad” I just think that it could be refined in a way that HA stays true to its original core base while making it more appealing to new and novice users. HA could definitely be intimidating if you’re a new user with no coding skills so I totally understand the push to make it more user-friendly. I’m sure there’s a way HA could be “dumbed down” and more Apple-like (sorry @Stiltjack for being smug. :joy:) while still keeping it as open as possible but it’s a fine line to walk. Is there a HA beta program that we can subscribe to as a way to help test the features of the next version.?

I’m sure the developers go crazy at times trying to make the best user experience for everyone so I definitely have some empathy for them. I could only imagine them reading “new issues” where an advanced user’s submitted issue is with a new weather integration because they feel that it should somehow be able to stop the snow and make it sunny and clear outside and a novice user’s submitted issue that the Lovelace Button Card isn’t working when it’s actually a PEBKAC error because they haven’t assigned an entity to it. Lol. :man_facepalming:

@erik3 well Windows 95 wasn’t that bad. Just think, it could be like Windows Vista. :astonished: I honestly don’t mind losing some of the things that have been depreciated in .yaml. For example, the depreciation of integrations setup in .yaml and having to use the UI wasn’t a huge change that affected me. Any changes that I had to make were one-time changes. My HA and coding skills are limited so I’ve done a lot of searching for how to install integrations and add-ons. The biggest issue that I have run into is outdated tutorials on the web. There have been several times in which I totally botched setting something up because I followed too many tutorials and used both .yaml and the UI. So for me, the conversion to the UI helped simplify things. Now if the ability to Split Configuration and use .yaml to set up input_booleans and other Helpers was depreciated and only capable in the UI well then I would be frustrated. I guess it just depends on how much I use something. I do agree with you about moving, copying, finding, searching, replacing, and maintaining large config sets. I use the replace feature in .yaml all the time. I’d go crazy if I wasn’t able to go to script.yaml, automation.yaml, or wherever and make bulk changes.

@C.G.B.Spender yeah this has been frustrating me too. I do like the ability to collaspable the sections but like you said it’s a pain to open each one just to see what it is. Some of the sections have labels on them and for me that little bit of information is all I need to see but other sections don’t have enough information on the label. Here are two examples of a label not having enough information.


I think if the Trigger condition and the Trigger ID or label was included in the information on the closed section you wouldn’t have to “unroll” anything and it would make things a lot easier.

The ability to reorder things is something entirely different though and I’m not sure what would work best. I personally usually just switch to .yaml and change things around so it doesn’t matter that much to me but I do think that both the old and the new way are not the ideal way. I don’t have the perfect answer so it’s hard to complain about it if I don’t have a better idea. A feature request that I do have is the ability to duplicate an Option inside of the Chose action. Right now I can only duplicate what’s inside of the Option but it would be nice to be able to duplicate the entire Options. A lot of times all of my Options are similar but might use a different Trigger along with only one change to something in an Action. What I do now switch to .yaml and copy and paste the Option as many times as I need it and then edit each one to what I need.

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@ludeeus thank you for switching me over to the correct Category.

settings > system > updates > 3dots > join beta channel

Open your Home Assistant instance and manage your pending updates.

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I completely agree with you about the Script editor’s “default” action. And while I would prefer they removed it, I do prefer that it’s not a completely blanks slate like the automation editor is when creating a new automation. You can still set the name, mode, and entity id right at the beginning when creating a new script… Why was that removed for new automations? It’s just weird that it’s inconsistent.

Those labels are editable. If you don’t like the auto-generated text, edit it so that it works for you. I’ve been editing them a couple at a time and it does make the whole collapsible nature of the components make more sense.

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@Didgeridrew I didn’t realize that they were editable until you just said something. I think that’s a nice feature but it’s also another step for something that was previously visible and automatic…

I actually just went back and took a look to see what populates on the labels of the closed sections and most of them are okay. It’s just a couple that I think could be improved on specifically anything that a user would use multiple instances of. I also just noticed that my Automation triggers are all different from what they previously were so the screenshot I posted isn’t a true reflection of what I would normally see on a label. I think what happened is that I recently reinstalled my Z-Wave and when I did that I used Find and Replace in .yaml to enter the new Z-Wave device IDs. My previous Automations used Device as the Trigger but somehow when I entered the new IDs the Triggers changed to zwave_js_value_notification.

I normally would use Device as the Trigger so the label would display something like Central Scene action on Endpoint 0 Scene 001 which isn’t that bad because I can at least see what button on my Zooz Scene Controller is being pressed. With zwave_js_value_notification everything is in Event data which is why the label doesn’t show anything. I guess in a perfect world I would prefer to still see a little more auto-populate on the label such as the Value showing KeyPressed1x or KeyPressed2x.

So it’s only in situations where users would use something multiple times. Besides Triggers the other one would be Options inside of a Choose action which is actually a “Trigger” Condition. Lol. So actually, if the Trigger ID would auto-populate on those labels then I would shut up about that part.

As for the “default” things I have no idea why they’re inconsistent. I personally like the blank template version. If I could have one change with that it would be to always have the ID of the created script or automation visible. I have had and I have seen a lot of users run into naming conflicts because of the lack of seeing this. I did find the ability to click on the three dots and choose Info in order to edit this but I think it’s something that I would prefer to have visible right underneath the Friendly Name in that top template section.