Help with spouse approval factor transitioning away from Google home

ylnest2018 · April 26, 2025, 10:30pm

So I’m about to try setup my wife on home assistant because I’m starting to reach the point where I’ve set up sensors to tell me when the dishwasher cycle is finished and a few others that I can’t simply move over to her preferred front end which is Google Home.

I’ve been exposing entities to Google and Apple home and for the most part it’s been good but getting to the point where I need to expose her to HA, however I do not want to overwhelm her because on first glance it can be aaaaaalot.

I’ve set up a test user to try tweak the user experience but I’m finding I can’t control what does or doesn’t show on the sidebar for her login.

I’m not sure I’m doing the whole dashboard thing right but I’ve set up dashboards for the highest used devices eg Climate, Lighting, and others, I’ve started to try make room specific dashboards so I can get an iPad or tablet in a room and have that dashboard completely up, but whilst this sounds easy in theory I’m not sure I’m executing it properly.

I know there are so many of you out there that have simplified the user experience for your families and hoping someone can just point me to a resource that would best explain sharing your HA to the family.

I’ve read things where people suggest having a separate user per tablet device however others have just gone with sharing a webpage or something, anyway I’d love some guidance and sorry if I’ve missed anything I’d be happy to share what’s required.

Didgeridrew · April 26, 2025, 11:00pm

The contents of the sidebar are managed per instance, not per user… no changes you make on another device will have any effect on what shows up when she first opens the app or a browser on her device(s).

ylnest2018 · April 27, 2025, 12:37am

Thanks for this info. Would this mean I’m best linking her directly to a dashboard? Or any suggestions outside of anything I’ve mentioned?

BenGlossop · April 28, 2025, 2:13pm

I’ve designed my frontend around the Wife Approval Factor too. I think you would be better off using views rather than dashboards as they are more intuitive to navigate. My frontend only uses the default dashboards, everything is separated out by views.

My frontend home page looks like this. The intent is to provide all the ‘I want this quick’ controls as well as giving some ‘at a glance’ information. I achieve this by using coloured icons to provide entity states (rather than using text), and big buttons for the most used entities (mostly lights).

We have more than 2 controllable lights in the Living Room but don’t I want them cluttering up the homepage so I have them on a subview. Press ‘Lighting Menu’ and you get more big buttons to choose from.

You can keep the view selection bar at the top of the app clear by changing a view to a subview. This will hide the view whilst keeping it accessible.

I find Mushroom Chips quite appealing to the eye, and they are small, so they are common in my frontend.