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.
It is. He is already typing/replying. 
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:
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.
Is there a dedicated UX team / person working at NC right now ?
Hi! 
It is. He is already typing/replying.
Haha yeah whoops, a little longer than expected
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.
Well yeah, but there are some generic golden rules, if you so want. Things like discoverability, consistency, reactivity and predictability. It’s also not easy to design a single UI for users with vastly different levels of technical skills.
I don’t know what exactly it is, I really can’t put my finger on it, but something always felt a little off in HA’s user interface. Not that it bothers me much, or maybe I just got used to it, but there’s definitely something. But good to know we have a UX guy working on it now !
IF you look at these 4 “generic golden rules” as you call them, i would say , over a longer period of time , it failed for every software , as time change, hardware changes, programming languages changes etc.
UX design isn’t easy. And things like touch completely changed the playing field, especially if you want to combine mobile and desktop UIs in a single system. So yeah things evolve, but probably for the better in the long term.
Wait now I want sommelier in my title…
Same here, but to be honest, most because of the changes in the last versions. As I started witn HA some years ago, everything felt directly intuitive. Of course, there where some functional gaps, but every release brought more features. And with regards to settings, there was a one pager where I was able to go to each setting via one click and where I saw what was in. Currently there is now a nested menu.
And the other changes in the last versions where at least not my taste either. Hiding more and more items, drop down boxes instead of showing it directly, hiding entity id’s, search for entity ids, etc.Most probably because I was used to other menus and places and perhaps because my muscle memory is bigger than others, but most of the listed things has really reduced usability a lot and some of them are not usable anymore, as you e.g. cannot distinguish entities.
And if there is a focus on UX, then I wonder, why there are really big open topics and bugs, where complete functions are not working on some platforms. An no, I’m not able to solve the bugs in my own in PRs. I would really like to see them closed, before there is a focus on new changes.
Take yourself less seriously.
I am happy that you are dedicated to making the UI /UX better for all. I expect over time we will see vast improvements.
I am on these forums daily as well as discord & reddit and did not see any request for user input. Was this done in the GitHub discussion?
So far, some things for me seem better, but most seem to take longer and more steps. As others have said above it may be due to “muscle memory” and it may get easier over time. Somethings just done make sense and seem broken, (like search). A menu with many single sub items just add more clicks.
^ I honestly think you should pay a LOT more attention to that number when implementing big UX changes
I have to admit it took quite a bit of poking around to figure out how to unsubscribe from the beta channel and how to perform a server restart. Most of the other stuff was reasonably easy to find.
Personally, I’d like to see a better development environment with some debugging tools. While I’m thinking of it, am I the only one who’d like to see monospaced fonts in a Card Configuration code editor?
Just today I replied to a post on FB about an infographics about the differences in the menu between 2022.4 and 2022.5.
Here is my comment:
“Working a lot with UX I have to say that this rationalization is almost perfect.
It will be hard to digest for those used to the old one, but now the arrangement is sooooo more correct, those who approach only today HA will find everything super tidy.
Fantastic!”
