Totally this.
UI is really nice.
To Point 1) i can’t say anything as it never bothered me in any way.
for 2 and 3 i can just say: Poster is right here!
But 4) is a killer. In yaml it was just a little change of an entry and everything worked fine again. Now for many integrations it feels like being locked out of my own system.
5) is a really nice idea! Please make this possible!
Greetings
Blubbel
In cosmically connected event, Geoff Geerling just did a video on how he commissioned a light switch and a motion detecter. It’s a fascinating display of just how a user’s path appears before them…HA UI team, check it out for deep insight:
This also gives an indication into how much of a challenge this new objective will be.
My summary: He found it easy, but not entirely intuitive.
A good HA intro I think.
I thought the same. Funnily enough, it was tiny things that caused him to stumble a little. Got there in the end although Geoff is smarter(tech wise) than your average bear.
Yes, that does help!
Two interesting comparisons would be
Him doing the same when I started HA in 2016
A not techy at all person doing the same.
Good news! Hope to see a real powerful upgrade.
But if we are speaking about experience it is very important to finish all bugs troubleshooting and full features adding for existing integration. Home Assistant issue tracker and community forum are full of bugs and important feature requests with no any feedback from authors. Some inquiries can stay with no any feedback from the authors for many months, what didn’t take place a couple of years ago.
Here are the examples:
I’m looking forward to the HA team hearing its users.
One fairly simple response, to Geoff’s experience of being left to wonder if the process of onboarding his devices was complete, is to present a ‘Finished?’ button allowing the user to decide this for themself. This button could be a simple link to a pre-filtered device list of the new devices that had been loaded. This would have led Geoff to his new toggle button etc. which in turn leads him to the opportunity of adding it to Lovelace
Yes to all of that, especially point 1 about math, so many times I find myself setting up a graph, gauge or card and find that 2 or more sensors dont have the same units.
Then I find myself copying and pasting a previous template, changing the friendly name but not the entity name and having to restart HA again. I lose data on some sensors when HA restarts, so that is another reason I try and avoid that.
It has been nice though in the last few iterations(past year maybe) that restarts don’t take anywhere near as long as they used to, so its not a chore like it was in the past.
I have so many friends who get really excited when ever I tell them about stuff I do with HA, and they always want it for their homes, too. But I know my friends, so I recommend not getting into home automation / HA. They expect things to be “plug&play” and easy to maintain and they would not understand most of the things I did to get my stuff running, and they would not want to spent that amount of time.
Maybe, when HA would become more streamlined, it would be more accessible (and less frustrating) for not so tech-savvy people.
Thank you for the update!
Something that I really think HA is missing, is a way to quickly schedule a one off action without creating any automations.
For example:
Click on a switch entity and set it to turn on or off in 20 minutes or when I leave home.
That is not automation, it is remote control with a delay.
Does that matter?
Only that HA is an automation platform, not a remote control platform.
Interesting, I never thought about those two as all that distinct.
Yeah I am probably being a bit pedantic, but automations are where its at.
Within that, I accept that there is a need sometimes for some people to turn a light or heater or whatever on for a user set but variable amount of time.
I hope that Zigbee network + Zigbee Coordinator backups in the ZHA integration are also part of what Home Assistant founders indirectly thought about in this blog-post about “Streamlining Experiences”, especially now that Home Assistant Yellow hardware will contain a Zigbee Coordinator as standard:
Another thing needing streamlined experience is an official integration for a DIY security alarm system.
The manual alarm control panel platform enables you to create an alarm system but it is not simple.
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/manual/
Could be much easier if has an official built-in native integration similar to “Alarmo” custom component:
https://github.com/nielsfaber/alarmo
https://github.com/nielsfaber/alarmo-card
If motion-activated lights is considered part of intro to home automation 101 then alarm system is 201?
We need a streamlined experience for recorder, history, and statistics. My current database file is 33gigs and I actually want a long history (currently set at 900 day purge) but probably some of it can become statistics.
There is currently no good UX for seeing and controlling MY data. I’d love to see which devices/entities are creating the most data and have control over retention down to the entity level.
Please consider streamlining the recorder/statistics into a new storage configuration screen so I can easily manage MY data.
Well you can control what is recorded down to entity level.
As far as detecting what is creating the most data, the database can be queried using standard sql, but I agree that is not intuitive.
Indeed…I’ve been waiting for the next month of what the heck to post this!
I know it isn’t automation, but it would be super helpful.