Today I was in the iOS ST app and all was working fine. I removed a siren device from the Devices screen “Remove device” and don’t recall seeing any confirmation “Are you sure?” dialog pop up. When I looked back down at the screen, it seemed like several devices had disappeared.
It took me a minute to realize my hub was no longer in the assigned room. I logged into Samsung account and checked, and sure enough my hub and all local devices were gone.
I called Smarthings support and after granting support access, the tech kindly (timidly?) suggested that perhaps my finger had slipped and I selected the hub for deletion. I said I was sure I selected the siren, but that either way, no confirmation dialog appeared. I asked if he could review log files to see if there was evidence I had deleted the hub, and he replied “Yes, it’s here in the logs.”
I asked if the hub configuration was recoverable and was told no. I sat there fr a minute in disbelief that this was possible. It’s not catastrophic because after many years with ST, I’ve been migrating to Home Assistant, but this seems like a really poor UX if indeed a slip of a finger can delete an advanced configuration developed over a decade, even worse if there’s no confirmation action, or configuration recovery.
Thanks jkp. Phew, so I’m not the first. But since I’m not the first, others have blazed the trail in this sad misadventure, AND the ST team has been inserted into this loop? And yet the unfortunate UI/UX still persists? (I for sure received NO confirmation dialog, whatever it was I deleted) These are the kinds of issues that should be prioritized by the product/dev team to save future FUBARS from actualizing. But, alas…
It certainly isn’t a smart move to have the hub display a page full of connected devices and then have ‘Edit device’ and ‘Remove device’ entries in the menu. Not only should they say ‘hub’ but even for other devices ‘Remove’ should not be at the same menu depth as ‘Edit’.
There should have been a confirmation screen though.
The yellow splodge hides the name of my hub. Having the hub name here is a poor choice because it not only has a significant chance of making the sentence read awkwardly (depending on the name) but it loses the emphasis on it being a hub you are deleting. It should be ‘This hub …’.
That is considerably more substantial than the confirmation box for a device but even more inadequate given the consequences. If those were terms and conditions you’d probably be forced to tick a box to acknowledge them before you could press a button to continue. Surely at the very least that should also be true when you are deleting something? A hub should need an extra check after that.
RBoy
(www.rboyapps.com - Making SmartThings Easy!)
6
Report it to Samsung support otherwise the UX team has now way to know about it. Maybe @jody.albritton can tag or pass it onto the appropriate person from the UX team to consider this.
