Hi, As UX designer for Home Assistant, I often come across “Home modes” in topics, interviews we conduct with users, and in other research.
I’m curious:
I have never heard of a Home Mode.
Been using HA since version 0.70-something.
I have the following modes in an input select:
Normal (just me at home)
Guest Home (I am home and a guest is staying)
Guest Away (I am not home for an extended period and a guest is staying)
Away (no one is home for an extended period)
Party Mode (lots of people are visiting for less than a day)
I use this input select as a condition in automations, e.g. I only want my “in recliner chair” automation running when in Normal or Guest Home modes. I also use it at start up to run lists of scripts. I do not use scenes as they are too restricted. Scripts are far more powerful.
At the moment I change the mode manually as it is only changed once a week or so at most.
Mind that some of my lights are motion/presence activated, so it’s not like the mode necessarily turns them on, it might just activate a working mode for them when they are on.
I have the Home State input_select:
Daytime – activates bright day lightsAfternoon – switches lights to be warm (yellow, orange)Redtime – switches lights to red (used for like an hour before going to sleep)Bedtime – deactivates most of the lights, keeps some of them redOutsidePhysical buttons:
Daytime and BedtimeOn my todo list:
Outside – vacuuming when I’m goneMovies – special lights for watching TVUsed to be (I moved to a new house recently):
Outside – lower the thermostat temperatureWhat’s the difference between a Home mode and a Scene?
Scenes are useless:
Mine is called House Mode and it is an input_select.
I have four modes: Preparing, Breakfast, Daytime and Bedtime.
They mainly affect the lighting, music and the alarmo.
The only mode that is “automatic” is Preparing at 5:00am. The bedside lights dim and increase in brightness.
A user pushes a button which advances the house mode. My husband pushes it when he gets up to make me coffee. (Yes, best husband ever). This puts us into “Breakfast”.
I have scenes for the lights based on the house mode. Example scenes: Kitchen Preparing, Kitchen Breakfast, Kitchen Daytime and Kitchen Bedtime.
In some cases the lights only come on with motion. In other cases the lights are always on. Taking the kitchen as an example,
Preparing
The lights are on in the kitchen regardless of motion. They are a nice welcoming, calm effect. This is a scene.
Breakfast
The lights are on in the kitchen regardless of motion. They are a springtime effect. This is a scene.
Daytime
If there is motion then the lights are on bright 100%. If there is no motion the lights go out after a period of time. No scene.
Bedtime
If there is motion then the lights are on very dim with calm colours. This is a scene.
The whole home music volume and channel are determined by the house mode.
For Alarmo it arms into armed_home with bedtime and disarms at preparing.
Pain points?
I have a script that is called by various input devices to advance the house mode. I’m not sure if HA could help with that (code below)
My masters is in Human Computer Interaction so I am somewhat anal about everything being obvious to the users. If I put something new in and my husband just starts using it without and “what is this thing” I consider it a win.
alias: House Mode Advance Manual
sequence:
- choose:
- conditions:
- condition: state
entity_id: input_select.house_mode
state: Preparing
sequence:
- target:
entity_id: input_select.house_mode
data:
option: Breakfast
action: input_select.select_option
- conditions:
- condition: state
entity_id: input_select.house_mode
state: Breakfast
sequence:
- target:
entity_id: input_select.house_mode
data:
option: Daytime
action: input_select.select_option
- conditions:
- condition: state
entity_id: input_select.house_mode
state: Daytime
sequence:
- target:
entity_id: input_select.house_mode
data:
option: Bedtime
action: input_select.select_option
default: []
mode: single
My wall tablet displays show this for the house mode.
I used to have it set that a tap would advance the house mode.
That became problematic as the ui sometimes took too long to respond. The user thought the tap did not take / hit and pushed it again. More often than not it put us into Bedtime by mistake.
I changed it to make it so a button tap on House Mode did a “Default (more info)”.
That gives me this on a tap,
which is not that “pretty”.
To improve my UI Home Assistant could give me a nicer, more pretty selector for my house mode. That said there is nothing wrong with the current one. It is just over kill as the user does not need the history.
Oh… so many
Guest mode - used to make automations more guest friendly. This one is a boolean (toggle) that can overlap with any other mode.
The rest is a select, with the key options being:
Rooms also have modes that define the overall desired room state
Thanks for reaching out as you explore this! It’s a non-trivial problem 
. There was a good recent discussion about this topic here
My perspective is that while a singular Home Mode item could be useful, it gets really complex with overlapping states (home/temporarily away/vacation mode, morning/day/evening/night cycle, etc). So having multiple key states (currently input_selects) is usually easier (though with it’s own set of complexities as well.)
My original usage of Home Modes came from the SmartThings world. I used them extensively there, and carried over the functionality in my automations when I migrated to Home Assistant.
I’ve got the following modes configured using an Input Select helper:
These are used in a wide variety of automations, both as triggers and as conditions. Some basic examples:
From these first few responses, you can already see that people use different names for similar concepts. What one calls “Night” another calls “Bedtime”. One person’s “Vacation” mode is another’s “Holiday” mode. And people are passionate about these names - it’s important that we can use the names that “feel right” to us for such a core concept.
So from a UX perspective, if you do incorporate a Home Mode, please ensure that we can change the name/labels to fit our particular preferences! If you provide an “evening” concept, please allow me to call it “dusk” or “twilight” or whatever I like.
See, for me those are different.
Many. Home modes (with input_booleans):
Mostly the Home modes are changed by automations or calendar but for some (for example guests, party or working days) they are turned on/off manually.
Google tried to “help” me once upon a time - I had separate, very specific bedtime and night routines (one got the house ready for bed, dimmed lights and such, and the other turned everything off). It thought it was helping by assuming both terms meant the same thing. After that happened, I had to make some custom routines (I forget the exact terminology in Google-land) to properly trigger the two different scenarios.
Just to reemphasize it for Matthias and the UX team, here are two totally legitimate examples where the names “Bedtime” and “Night” are used in completely opposite ways! If HA does introduce “Modes” for concepts such as “the time period after dark and before bed” or “everyone is away from home for an extended period”, it would be so much better received and user-focused if we could choose our own wording for how those modes are labeled.
I don’t currently use “modes” this way. My life just isn’t that organized.
However, I agree with @PecosKidd that it’s critical to make this kind of functionality extremely flexible. And I’d add, make it optional. Everyone uses HA differently. Don’t box anyone in!
I know that this is opposite what some UX designers want. But for actual users, it doesn’t have to be tidy. It doesn’t have to be beautiful. It doesn’t have to be simple enough for a beginner or outside reviewer to understand. It just has to provide enough functionality and flexibility that we can work it into our own strategy.
Home: Duh
Home - Night: Basically disables all motion activated lights
Away: Turns up/down HVAC
Vacation: After Away for 24 hours, it turns on vacation mode which repeats light actions from the last 7 days
This is Home Assistant. I can’t imagine they have any plans to make anything static. Even if they did, you don’t have to use it. Just keep doing whatever you’re doing!
I have the same, but got them from Homey Home automation. They even had shiny button stickers that I still use on an Aqara remote:
ps. The buttons are clean, not filthy, the camera is bad with low light.
Home is present and awake, sleep is everyone is in bed, away is normal absence, vacation is long term absence. So many automations use this I lost count. But for instance vacation mode disables a lot of automations, uses pseudo random lighting in the evening to simulate presence.
