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:
Very slow work of lovelace in case it has a lot of entities and last visited lovelace page loss;
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.
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:
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.
Enocean is keeping me from using it for all of my smarthome devices. I switched from homee and hue … zigbee and zwave already running. But enocean is the hell. Worse experience. Fhem and node red way better. And that is sad.
my Hora SmartDriveMx heater valves not supported
10 bit EEP for enocean temp/humidity sensors not supported
without custom components to emulate at least some of the features I would be lost
Some of the former homee devs would contribute, if pull requests for enocean would be allowed. As of today, the lack of support there is sad. I know there are more urgent topics, but enocean is not that bad for sensors… as the energy harvesting is working pretty well and not changing a battery a good thing.
Automations are too basic in the UI, needs to be improved. Easier handling for light Szenen and motion detectors. Avoid multiple automations (on / off automation) and define it in one automation with on and off condition
Add more graphs and history (as available for the energy management) for temperatures, etc. customizable, comparable. That would help.
Possibility to defrag database. Combine historical data, instead of saving single values per minute, do it as medians of an hour or so. That would reduce the amount of disk space.
With the focus on moving everything to the UI and trying to make this consumer-friendly HA really needs SAFE defaults, built in cleanup / maintenance functions, etc all exposed in the UI… Also UI ways to do filters etc for Logbook (mostly useless noise unless you filter things in YAML), History Needs more filters views etc right now it is an ugly list of graphs (needs grouping options by type, area etc), Recorder (also needs UI for filter controls and maintenance currently are all YAML)
There is one, super-missing thing in HA, that would make many user’s lifes easier - easy setup of schedules. I really believe this is the most common automation use cases. The more detailed use cases for this include heating (time range per day, temperature-driven), lights control (time and lux sensor-driven), water sprinklers / valves control (humidity driven). There’s a custom component for this with a quite good UI and UX (Scheduler card/custom component), but would be great to see it integral part of HA.
Of course all of this may be done using HA automation, but in most cases this is awkward from the UI point of view (not easy and intiutive config change, no clear schedule overview UI) and I understand the goal is to make it easy, quick and user friendly.
Sample UIs for this, posted in the Feature Requests section of HA Community, which propose even better UI: