Lol. Good luck with this request. People have been asking for this since the beginning, but smart things ignores the request. Whoever is in charge of UI development needs to rethink their approach pronto or hire someone new who will.
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Itās curious to note that even those who give SmartThings positive review, have nothing good to say about its UI.
Thereās al least one thing that is certain - it would be extremely hard to come up with more convoluted and less intuitive UI design than SmartThings has today. So from this perspective, yes, any customization feature would be a huge step forward. 
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Yeah, ive seen it since the beginning. Just want to get something constructive going. Realy ideas instead of emotions and opinion.
Most people like solutions and not more problems. Maybe if we come to them with a solution they may listen.
Itās worth a shot
It is a positive testament to the developer interfaces of SmartThings (and the brilliant members of the developer community and our SmartThings support team!) that we can implement various workarounds for what feel like fundamental flaws in the user interface, etcā¦
The complexity, limitations, and effectiveness of these workarounds varies, however.
More philosophically, though, I think there is an important line between what should be integral to SmartThings (especially elements of the official UI and especially the availability of First-Class Objects to enable things like Scenesā¦), and optional enhanced functionality developed by third parties.
I suppose this line is really a, hopefully narrow, grey-neutral zone, but, still. Itās like the difference between the kernel and various standard Unix libraries vs. ???
If SmartThings were an āOpen Source Projectā (Like Android OS?) upon which new features and fixes would be discussed by the community, etc., this would be a different discussion. Kludging or patching around weaknesses in the base SmartThings platform is highly inefficient, IMHO, as it will result in deviation from standard expectations (i.e. fragmentation), and certainly confusion at the consumer level.
I admire your optimism, but returning to the subject of this thread, even a simple enhancement as adding labels (or making them optional) in the tile view has been requested so many times and the last thing Iāve heard (several month ago), they were ādebatingā it internally, which basically tells me they donāt have a good UX lead on their team, unfortunately. Otherwise there would be no need to debate it.
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Thanks for the reminder, Geko!
I hesitate to make any conclusions as to the skills of SmartThingsās UX team or lead, just in case they make things worse as revenge (JK!!! 
).
Seriously, though, the corporate product design process is pretty insane across all sorts of product categories. Sometimes some things must just slip-through and get baked-in, and other times there must be incredible organizational politics at play.
Pardon this off-topic rant:
Using Samsung as coincidental (or tangential) example: I have a Samsung microwave oven. One of itās āfeaturesā are pre-programmed modes for making popcorn, heating a beverage, melting chocolate, etcā¦ However, none of these does anything besides set the timer and power level, and none of these is customizable (the beverage setting is useless ā far too short). Meanwhile, various features that can be customized are things like: the time of day, sound level (beep, beep), reminder mode, 24 hour clock, display brightness and speed, etc. ā problem is: There is absolutely no non-volatile storage or battery backup for these settings; which are numerous and important enough for it to be a bother to redo them all. Brief power outages are not out of the ordinary in this country, no? So way too much engineering was spent on useless features, rather than an important convenient one.
Donāt get me started on dozen+ the pre-programmed modes on my LG Dryer, only one of which sets the temperature below āmediumā and burns the heck out of my clothes (and NONE of which allow you to override the temperature setting; thus forcing me to use the very basic manual 1960ās timed dry mode 90% of loads).
Grrrr.
ā¦CP/Terry.
So the people in this thread that are responding.
Can you describe the changes you would want implemented. No emotion, just this is what it currently is, this is what i think it should be. If you were the UX dev what would you do tomorrow to make it better?
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Valid point. Saying āgood luckā sarcastically, as I did, while valid in one sense, doesnāt really help.
What would be great is if ST had a change request/idea forum that people can post their ideas and requests and option for otherās to vote thumbs up/down. Then have ST draw from this to get idea of what features are in highest demand.
I think, in the end, my optimistic for ST is slowly turning pessimistic as I go from forums to their support, which is great most times, but are not always up to date on features/bugs in the system, or who have been told to spit out āfluffā to the customers.
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Iām a relatively new user and reading through this thread there are two things I would highlight that I would want. Here they are along with use cases:
-
Iād like to be able to create a dashboard/view with temperatures pulled from all of my multi-sensors, and also have those same sensors represented in other dashboards/views. So while I do want to know if my basement door is open, Iād also love to know the temperature down there in another view. Same with my Multi-motion sensor outside. I like knowing if there is motion or not - but the temp would be good to know also. Itās difficult to click into the sensor (after I shake my device ālike a polaroid pictureā to tell me which of the dozens of icons it is) and then navigate in to view the temp. Sort of eliminates the value of any sensor with more than one function because of that UI limitation.
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For the love of pete - just put the damn labels on the icons. Make the shake feature for the useless non-descriptive icons and non-labels. Then we can laugh about it while having a functional UI. Sample use case = 95% of all users will like it and Iāll stop whining. Everyone wins!!!
Long story short - make the UI as customizable as the rest of Smartthings. Iām amazed at how easy (and Iām a non-coder) it is to write custom applications to interface and do things based upon my suite of āthingsā. But Iām equally amazed at how rigid and non-functional the UI is. The UI really is the achilles heel of this entire system.
-Jeff
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With respect to Thing Labels, specifically, I think either of these two options are workable:
(Assuming labels can fit on the Tiles while still viewing the underlying icon, temperature value, etcā¦ ā perhaps Things will need a short label attribute.)
- A global app setting of labels on/off.
and/or
- A toggle selector: on/off (or labels/icons/both) in the non scrolling top 10% of the Thing tile view pages, replacing
shake.
Thanks.
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Good stuff! Love it so far!:)
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-
Landscape view. Itās ridiculous not to have one. The old argument (itās an iPhone app) does not hold anymore since most iPhone 6+ apps support landscape mode and this is how I mostly use it. I donāt want to rotate my phone when I switch between the apps.
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Option to display labels in the tile view (on per-device basis, preferably). I donāt want to shake my iPhone 6+, FFS.
Thereās a lot of other things that include app management, mode management, user management etc., but these are the low-hanging fruit.
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A dashboard which can be totally customized. Isnāt that what a dashboard is?
Yeah, I think this is the root of the issue. The ādashboardā is kind of a misnomer in the STs world.
We need a fully customizable UI
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Boom. Exactly. Also +1 to the landscape ask. My phone is landscape in my car mount and itās horribly difficult to set my alarm while Iām driving away, and open/close the garage door. . .etc. etc. etc. I have a spare tablet I was going to mount on the wall by my wifeās side of the bed, but I REFUSE to mount a tablet vertically. Itās not happening on principle.
-Jeff
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Most of my thoughts on how to make the app usable have already been stated, but Iāll reiterate anyway.
Priority 0 (Blocker) - Must address before the next release
- Add text descriptions to things view.
- Remove the shake feature from all apps, delete all references to the shake feature from smartthings.com, and ban the word āshakeā on the forums.
Priority 1
- Make modes and hello home actions first class citizens on the the main dashboard page. The current mode should also be visible directly on the main dashboard page.
- Add option to add a picture to all tiles in all views
- Add a dashboard view that is very generic and fully customizable. Allow features such as groups aka āroomsā and symbolic links to any tile, sub-tile, mode, hello home action, SmartApp, etc. All features of the current things and dashboard views should be available.
Priority 2
- Add landscape mode for the Android app.
- Add tablet optimization to the Android app.
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Good stuff! I am compiling a list. Anyone else that viewed/commented on this thread have some other suggestions?
The more āammoā we have the better 
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In addition to being able to group the things symbolically in however many groups, you should be able to have a different state displayed dependent on the group. For example, I may want a group of just temps so all the multi sensor things would be configured to show temps in that group. The same sensor thing in another group could then be configured to show the sensor status such as open/close, motion in the other group. So configurable views for each representation of a thing across the soft tiles.
DEFINITELY labels.
A BIG hopeā¦
Ability to group within a group. I have my den that has three Philips Hue bulbsā¦I would like to group those together as āHue Bulbsā in my āDenā group. A bigger hope would then be able to act on a group, specifically hue, and dim them all or set them all to the same color as opposed to trying to get each bulb to be the same individually.
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Good Stuff!!!
Can anyone come up with a valid reason NOT to display device labels? I couldnātā¦
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