The issue
The use of the target selector for the scene.turn_on
action provides several options of limited utility, leading to a confusing and unintuitive user experience.
Elaboration
When adding a scene.turn_on
action in a graphical editor (for scripts or automations), a target selector is used, providing the user with four choices:
- Choose area
- Choose device
- Choose entity
- Choose label
I believe at least one of these options is entirely extraneous, and another has questionable utility:
- Choose device: Unless I’m mistaken, a scene will never be a device. This option will always do nothing.
- Choose area: If you had only one scene defined for one or more areas, I suppose it would be possible to activate them this way. Otherwise, why would you wish to activate multiple scenes at once?
- Choose label: I can imagine activating multiple scenes across the house at once here—like all scenes labeled “Evening”.
- Choose entity: This is the most straightforward choice, and I expect the one most commonly sought when the
scene.turn_on
action is chosen, as it allows the user to choose a scene to turn on.
Consequences
Because the options presented by the target selector make little immediate sense in the context of the chosen action, I have witnessed users become confused and project their own meanings onto the options. For instance, I’ve seen a user interpret “Choose area” as a filter, expecting to be able to select an area, and then browse all scenes assigned to that area and pick one to target. Similarly, since “Choose device” does not make obvious sense otherwise, I’ve seen this interpreted as “Pick a device (and we’ll show you all scenes that include it).”
This leads to frustration, because seemingly half of the options presented do nothing or very little, and the “right” choice (most of the time) is only apparent if you know that scenes are entities.
This is not an insurmountable obstacle. Many of us have learned what we need to use this effectively. But I believe it is a particularly acute example of the target selector being an inappropriate choice of UI element, creating unnecessary friction and opacity at a time when HA development seems focused on improving the user experience and removing these counterintuitive interactions.
Requested Fix
A different UI flow for this action, please.
One option would be adding the option to hide, reorder, and rename the various target options in the target selector. “Choose device” could be hidden; “Choose entity” renamed to “Choose scene”.
Another option would be a more bespoke, different selector for this scene action. I don’t quite know what; I’m not a UI expert. Perhaps it could, in fact, filter scenes by their areas or the devices included, the way some users wrongly expect the current selector to do.
Thank you for your consideration.