Streamlining Experiences

It is going to be an exciting year. Thank you to all involved.

Are there any plans afoot to fix the database?

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I would love to see an option to group automations. I could see groups for Christmas lighting, Pool automations, Lighting automations, etc. The list grows very quickly and with no ability to group them it gets ugly.

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You just made my day. I didn’t realize this happened, fantastic. I have quite a few terrible templates to turn into much cleaner auto-off triggers now lol

I know it’s limited but I organise my automations by name so:
LIGHTS - Trigger - Action
or
ACTION - Trigger - Action

First word is just a grouper.

I do the same but once you get dozens and dozens of them it gets a bit ugly. It would be nice to have tabs or something to better segregate them. Also, ideally, it would allow you to enable/disable an entire group with a single switch.

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Very interesting video. The UI/UX team should definitely take a look at that. This kind of experience feedback is very valuable. At my job, that’s exactly the kind of feedback we, the dev team, love. You have a guy who is a neophyte with HA but at the same time a very technical user. So when he hits a stumbling block, it doesn’t just stop there, he actually explains the reasoning behind why he had problems and what could have prevented him from experiencing the usability issues.

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I name mine as well but would love to be able to group them. As sometimes it takes several individual automations to make a more complex one…

Also just in general having them categorized would be nice.

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Just let me throw tags on them, and filter by them, so I can have overlapping groups.

This would allow us to filter automations by room, device type like lights, or function.

Tags should also cover entities, scripts, devices etc.

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This is the way.

In terms of streamlining things, a few things I’d like to see:

  1. I’d love it if you could rename all the zwave entities of a device when adding it. When I add a zwave device, I usually have to go and change about 6-8 friendly names and another 6-8 device ID’s, and all I’m doing is changing them to the same exact thing with the same suffix that’s already there. Why can’t I just be asked to do this in the UI and have it replace all the names with the name I choose and append the suffix for each of the device ID’s and friendly names? It would save so much time. As it stands, I hate adding zwave devices for this reason.

  2. Please fix the zwave migration tool to zwavejs2mqtt, I really want to use it.

  3. I’d like themes to be able to work for card-mod and also custom:button-card. Most really nice UI’s I see involve quite a bit of customizations of those two things in addition to the theme, and it would be so nice if we could simply install a theme which gave us the full look without often many mandays of tweaking in all the various customizations which are needed.

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You can already do this. Rename the device and it will rename the associated entities. BTW, this is how all devices work. Rename the device and it will rename the entities as long as the entities share a common name with the device, which they do after initial setup.

What’s wrong with it…

hmm, that never seemed to happen for me, but I will try it again next time I set up a Zwave device and will see.

What’s wrong with it…

See here and here. From what I can tell, no one has used it successfully so far.

Yes, I thought this video was very telling UX wise.

you don’t have to wait for zwave, any new integration just change the device name and it’ll update all the associated entities as long as they contain a shared naming convention with the device name.

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I’m tweaking some automations now based on a new phone, and this proposed feature (notify person, akin to associating a device tracker with a person) seems like a “small” feature that would certainly streamline some experiences, including one mentioned in the original post. :slight_smile:

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I don’t know if this the right place or even if it will be picked up by anyone who can make a difference but can we please have a little more focus on colour blindness? A while ago we had the ESPHome changes which made it almost impossible to tell what was online (since fixed). Now I would like to see some changes to the automation and script trace/debugging screens.

I find these symbols extremely difficult to decipher. Rather than have some vague colour borders around the symbols (I believe there are three being used) that are very hard to discern couldn’t they be more pronounced?

And better yet, why does every symbol have to be on a white background? At the very least the current step could have a different colour background - that would be a huge improvement on its own.

Thanks for listening.

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And separate to this but still UI focussed, I can’t be the only one who would like the step up and down buttons not to scroll off the top of the page with the symbols?

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I’d propose to create a feature request / discussion in the HA frontend repository. I think that way it has a higher chance of being seen.

Or a different shape. Why do they all have to be circles ? They could change shape (box, octagon, etc) and size along with color changes. The connecting paths could be dashed and/or have their width change.

Done.
And included the excellent idea from @HeyImAlex