Just posting because I’d like to share my experiences and ask what rest of the community think about this.
As one IT guy to another - I think that what was done with UI redesign in newest release should be considered a war crime.
Getting rid of nice panel, allowing user to see the system status at a glimpse (like above) to replace with multiple nested menus? User have to go trough three menus to get to storage Panel where he is shown… this:
I advertise HA to all of my friends - there are some out there who I managed to evangelize into it. And that’s why I do care - I depend on HA for my whole house automation, and I am throwing new stuff at it all the time
Despite my emotional connection I am trying to keep the discussion civil, a bit funny (sorry my humor didn’t match some of your taste Taras) and what’s most important - constructive. That’s why I pinpointed certain problem - with example screenshots.
The fact that it passed unnoticed during the community feedback round is not the best defense. Tell me, you, personally as a CentralCommand Mike - do you think this particular change (dismantling of a single place where you could glimpse the state of your hardware setup) was a good one?
Mind that I am talking only about this part. Overall a lot of things were implemented that needed to be done for some time - like sorting out automations, blueprints, devices, entities for example - cleaning this in the interface should make the learning curve easier for newcomers.
Thanks for pointing out the tests either way - one can’t participate actively in all the opensource world, but I’m looking forward to be able to contribute in the future. The more the merrier!
EDIT: @zoogara Yes, I suspect so - but those pages scaled pretty nice in previous UI on both mobile and tablet. The approach to not fix something that isn’t broken is not a bad one (and is also what my wife tells me before that didn’t I say so moment)
If you want my assessment then here’s my thoughts:
The system health screen is great! It shows so much more information then the old hassio info panel, information that was only previously accessible via the CLI. These are things that I might actually need to look up once in a while to debug something like what the current version is of stuff I’m running or startup times of things.
The Storage screen is kind of odd. It feels incomplete with its one graph. I’m guessing there’s more things to be added there. But tbh I really don’t care, my used space doesn’t change very quickly and I have an alert if it gets too full. I dunno why I’d ever look at this page unless more stuff is added.
Hardware again feels a little incomplete. Just an FYI that information was never shown in the old UI though so it could be useful to be able to get to it without the CLI. I hope someday “reboot host” and “shutdown host” get added to the command pallette as I find it annoying to have to navigate to any UI to press a button. At least I rarely need those, I’ll probably keep doing it with the CLI in the meantime.
Network (which you aren’t showing), is very handy. Multiple network related things have now been combined into one place with far less pop-ups. Well done.
Logs - Amazing. Full screen for them! All logs in one place (addons too)! Searchable! I would estimate 90% of the time I went to the old UI you’re showing it was to look at logs so this is a massive win and truly makes me almost not care about the rest. Like I seriously can’t emphasize this enough. You’re complaining about how one screen got split into 3? This change combines over 20 screens into one for me (not a joke). I am ecstatic. EDIT: Actually almost 30 screens, man I have a lot of addons.
I would also note that I honestly could care less where the graphs in that old UI got put, I never once looked at those. Seeing CPU, memory usage, and even storage usage at a random point in time is a pretty irrelevant data point. I have a dashboard that shows me a graphs of those over time although tbh I don’t look at that much either, only if there’s some kind of issue.
In terms of system monitoring I set up alerts for all the stuff I care about. My opinion is that if something isn’t important enough to wake me up with a push notification then it doesn’t matter. Actively monitoring systems with some kind of dashboard is not really a thing. Even if you imagine a company with the funds to hire people to literally sit and stare at system metrics all day every day those people are just going to ping an admin if they see something, its just a weird manual alert system. Those graphs may look nice but since they only show the current value they aren’t really useful for diagnosing an issue you received an alert for therefore they don’t matter to me.
I’m definitely in the “neutral” group, but if 68% of the feedback was neutral or negative, is it worth making these UI changes? Less then a 1/3 of the participants actually liked the changes.
I mean tbh human beings as a whole are pretty resistant to change and gut reaction tends to be negative. So having 50% neutral and 30% positive is honestly pretty good with the idea being that a) people will likely get used to it and like it more over time and b) the design itself will evolve and improve from feedback over time.
Either way even if you exclude the neutral there was more positive then negative.
We sure are. Probably best having these incremental changes though versus everything changing at once and then its impossible to find anything. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt as I’m sure the final product will function better then the way it worked before.
I wish I had seen the design test to offer input. I like many of the changes, but there are many that don’t make sense to me.
You can also look at the results another way that the majority is neutral or negative (68%). To me this is not a good indicator for making this change.
I wasn’t even aware something like this existed. And I bet most people weren’t either. What would you need to do to participate in these in the future ?
Another question. Is there a dedicated UX team / person working at NC right now ? Someone who is not a developer, but an actual professional UX/UI expert ? Just curious. HA’s UX and UI have always felt like they were designed by programmers.
But this is why I personally do not understand as well, why there is such a strong focus on one column design with nested menus and a lot of clicks and empty big screens, instead of having a state of the art responsive behavior with a minimum of clicks and usage the benefits from bigger screens as well.
At the end of the user test we asked “What is your overall opinion about this design?”. This was the responds:
2% (21) Like extremely
30% (276) Like very much
53% (481) Neutral
12% (108) Dislike very much
3% (26) Dislike extremely
3 respondents passed
I’m definitely in the “neutral” group, but if 68% of the feedback was neutral or negative, is it worth making these UI changes? Less then a 1/3 of the participants actually liked the changes.
You are making some wrong conclusions, because you can’t just add up answers like these. It’s like I’d say, “85% of the feedback was either neutral or positive. More people liked it than didn’t like it.”. Making choices about UI changes based on this one question is also dangerous. It gives an overall picture, the other questions are more interesting for interpretation why people like or dislike it.
We wanted to organize our menu, as it was having some growing pains. It had duplicated features and was not grouped logically. I think most of us can agree on that. We had some ideas that we wanted to validate with this test, some of it worked and some didn’t. With the learning from this test we designed an improved concept.
A couple of releases ago we made a first iteration, this release we did a next and maybe bigger one. We know that changes like this have affect on people’s daily use and that some of us don’t like it. What I do know is that we made these changes with the best intentions, to fix our menu by creating logical grouping and combining duplicated features. Recently I saw a quote: “You can please some of the people some of the time but you can’t please all of the people all of the time”.
Every day we learn something new. Please know that I try to read all the UX comments on this forum, Reddit and Twitter (because of time I won’t respond to all). We will continue to improve our user interface. I don’t expect major iterations on the Settings menu like this release, but we will continue to refine and iterate on it.
We made the user test results public on purpose to give everyone an opportunity to gain some insights. People can also ask questions, discuss them or suggest improvements for future research. Asking questions and give feedback why we made these menu changes is part of this game.
Be aware of making conclusions though.
Yes neither was i, and have been wondering, but i think at 2022.4 release they presented a guy their, if im not wrong, as UI/UX “Developer” , Whether it’s a programmer, expert, or noob is really not very relevant, as time changes, as -well as common interpretion of what’s cool/intuitive/smart etc. and we all have different taste and thoughts on that … So i would also take the chance to participate in such or similar User-Tests, if i noticed a request for it
Thou many thing are to be learned, when you are new and start with not only a new “Software”, then sign up at a “Forum” and even get directions to “GitHub” , and/or Discord , man i felt like i’ve been living in “protected” environment, far from this reality, before i Joined HA … And i have actually worked with IT for 2 development companies, so i know the “routines” … from an inside perspective
( Beside i know how UI/UX " People, are like common folks, thou there comes a NEW generation every3-4 year)
EDIT: AHH so Matthias was hes name … yeah your face seems familiar
Thanks for your feedback. It’s not necessarily focused on one column, it’s within the context of our current user interface. For example, there is a maximum number of tabs we can show and adding a sidebar next to the main menu bar is ugly in its current state. Doesn’t mean we can’t fix this, but not in this release.
I am trying to keep the discussion civil, a bit funny (sorry my humor didn’t match some of your taste Taras) and what’s most important - constructive. That’s why I pinpointed certain problem - with example screenshots.
… yeah your face seems familiar 