Feature Request: Label on tile "previews" in things view

Apps & Clients
41

I’m glad to see some momentum behind the idea of soft tiles (or whatever term makes the most sense…).

It will help if we grasp the usefulness of this in various contexts, but also if the fundamental concept can be as simple as possible.

But I’m not ready to try to write a formal semantic specification yet; just offering these bullets for discussion and/or confirmation:

  1. Any Thing’s Tile and/or Sub-Tile should be able to be “copied as shortcut” (i.e., replicated as a soft tile) that can be placed in any Tile Group. This should be a n:m relationship (i.e., many-to-many relationship: A particular soft tile can be placed and appear in many tile groups and a tile group, obviously, can contain 0 to many soft tiles. This is in contrast to the current UI which,in Thing View, there is a 1:n relationship (a Thing Tile can only appear in at most one Thing group (or no Thing group). A Tile Group is not restricted in the number or types / capabilities of soft tiles it contains (i.e., you may create a tile group of all your motion sensors, but that is not a restriction; you can just as easily create a tile group mixing sensors with switches – e.g., motion sensors + sirens in a security themed group).

  2. A Soft Tile should be as functional as possible. If the soft tile is a copy of (i.e., shortcut to) a Main Tile, then the soft tile should function exactly like a Main Tile (i.e., act as a toggle on/off, offer a gear icon to expand into detailed view with sub-tiles, etc.). This is in contrast to the current dashboard shortcut pages which have icons that cannot be drilled into for details, even dim level, for example.

  3. We need to acknowledge that the Dashboard shortcut pages (such as “Lights & Switches”) do provide some partial functionality that is similar to this feature request, but it falls far short. Shortcut pages are restricted to devices of the same capability; shortcut pages only display the Main Tile for a Thing (or for a group of Things) – no option to select one of the sub-tiles as the display, and, in fact, no gear-icon for opening the detailed view with sub-tiles. A group shortcut on a shortcut page, is restricted to devices of the same capability and has no drill down (i.e., no practical way to open the group shortcut to access the individual Things). A good current feature, however, is that the user is able to execute an action against group shortcuts (well… only one specific action, as far as I know: toggle the entire group on/off). It would be good to be able to apply this sort of feature to Tile Groups, though it is difficult to define deterministic behavior if the Things in the Group are of different capabilities: e.g., if you create a Tile Group of all the items in your bedroom (lights, temperature sensors, sirens), then what does activate on this Group mean? Turn on all the lights? Turn on any device that can be turned on (including the siren)?

  4. Tile Groups should be fully-nestable (i.e., any Tile Group can contain any other Tile Group … any Tile Group could be the parent and/or child of any other Tile Group: There is no difference between a Tile Group and a Tile Sub-Group). Recursive looping relationships may be permissible if these can be handled smoothly by the interface (ummm… I think Windows and Linux, for example, have no problem allowing you to put a shortcut/soft-link to your parent inside your child… but recursive directory listings need to mark the tree so as to only follow each branch once). So if you tried to toggle on/off a tile group that somewhere looped upon itself… no problem… the traversal algorithm should only walk through each soft tile once per command.

…CP.

2 Likes
42

I once worked for a startup where one of the founders was heavily involved in s/w development in the early stages, particuarly UI. Since he wasn’t really a expert (to put mildly), he made a lot of design blunders that he thought were good ideas. Unfortunately, people who were hired later to work on that code were too hesitant to make any significant changes probably because they din’t want to hurt his feelings or displease him. I’m not suggesting that’s the case here, just an anecdote from personal experience :smile:

3 Likes
43

Yup…

As impartial professional folks out here in the Community, I think most of us are reasonably curious as to what the “internal debate” regarding labels and shake actually is, in full factual detail – not to pass judgement on the designers/debaters involved, but rather, because we really want to fully understand the topic. There is a chance we’ve all missed something critical about the issue, and if we heard all the sides from inside SmartThings, we might even be swayed.

Though, frankly, by NOT knowing the details of the debate, I think we are in a better position to make impartial recommendations on from a “black box” perspective; untainted by legacy code and/or internal politics.

44

It does seem logical. It would also be nice if there was an indicator around the circular portion of the tile (when items are grouped together) to let you know upon a glance that there is activity. For example the white space around the doors tile could turn red indicating one or more door sensors have been triggered rather than clicking on the tile to see the yellow or green indication of the door status.

2 Likes
45

Yes… Good idea I did not include in my description of Tile Groups…

Namely, if there is any intuitive way that the Group icon can represent the state of its contents, then it should, please.

Once again, this is currently the behavior of Groups of Shortcuts (under Dashboard pages) and it works reasonably well because all contained things must have same capability (i.e, 2 of 4 lights are on; some motion sensors have activity, no doors are open / some doors are open):

With more complex tile groups that contain soft tiles of Things of various capabilities, then the display choice is not without complexity: But, if we use the icon, center and border and title and sub-title of the group tile with colors, etc., the possibility of conveying a lot of info without drill down is indeed, deterministically possible!!

1 Like
46

Ok, so here is what i have so far. Did i miss anything? Sorry its a little hard to read.

  1. Labels labels and more labels.
    a. Currently the user interface is very hunt-and-peck
    b. This is cumbersome and a lot of times leads to some frustration.
    c. Getting rid of this hunt-and-peck would alleviate a lot of the pain points of the UI

  2. “Shortcuts” to the different devices
    a. Nested devices within groups
    b. Any Thing’s Tile and/or Sub-Tile should be able to be “copied as shortcut” (i.e., replicated as a soft tile) that can be placed in any Tile Group. This should be a n:m relationship (i.e., many-to-many relationship: A particular soft tile can be placed and appear in many tile groups and a tile group, obviously, can contain 0 to many soft tiles. This is in contrast to the current UI which,in Thing View, there is a 1:n relationship (a Thing Tile can only appear in at most one Thing group (or no Thing group). A Tile Group is not restricted in the number or types / capabilities of soft tiles it contains (i.e., you may create a tile group of all your motion sensors, but that is not a restriction; you can just as easily create a tile group mixing sensors with switches – e.g., motion sensors + sirens in a security themed group).
    c.
    i. These would have data that would be “copyable” from any device type and could be represented in any group.
    ii. Theses would need to also be actionable just as the “things” device would be
    iii.
    d. Nested Groups within Groups
    i. i.e. Allow groups within groups so a “lights” group can then further be grouped by “room”
    ii. Tile Groups should be fully-nestable (i.e., any Tile Group can contain any other Tile Group … anyTile Group could be the parent and/or child of any other Tile Group: There is no difference between aTile Group and a Tile Sub-Group). Recursive looping relationships may be permissible if these can be handled smoothly by the interface (ummm… I think Windows and Linux, for example, have no problem allowing you to put a shortcut/soft-link to your parent inside your child… but recursive directory listings need to mark the tree so as to only follow each branch once). So if you tried to toggle on/off a tile group that somewhere looped upon itself… no problem… the traversal algorithm should only walk through each soft tile once per command.

  3. Customizable dashboard categories
    a. This might be one category that we can do whatever we want with, or maybe we can add all the categories we want.
    i. Keep the current categories. Let the end user choose how they want the data displayed.
    b. Allow us to group devices together into any dashboard category.
    i. i.e. This would allow us to have a dashboard category that could be a “Living room” or “Basement” or “Entertainment Center” etc…
    ii. This would allow for a deeper user experience from the outset of the app
    iii. Would help to eliminate the hunt/peck of the current user intereface.

  4. Better display of data on the “Group” icon
    a. Any groups should be able to display at least one of the statuses of the devices in the group.
    b. Something mentioned in the forum would be allowing different parts of the tile to display some info.
    i. Examples

  5. The white ring around the tile would go red if there is something out of the ordinary

  6. The “value” portion of the groups tile could be used to display an open/close sensor in the group, temp, humidity etc. This would allow for greater functional use of groups.

  7. Better display of data on the dashboard
    a. Can we have the dashboard sections display custom data?
    b. Would be awesome to allow this so we can again be fully immersed into the STs app from the start
    i. Currently to get any real data you have to click something

  8. This keep me, and a lot of other people, from opening the app and getting the data from other soruces.
    ii. Would be awesome to open the app and see the data you want to see from the start.

  9. Allow groups created to be actionable
    a. If I have a group of lights I should be able to click on the group and turn on those lights
    b. Likewise I should be able to action that group in a smart app.
    i. i.e. If I select a group in a smart app to turn on lights during motion all the lights in that groups should turn on when motion is detected.

7 Likes
47

I would love labels as would my wife (we are running out of distinct icons!).

Just a thought from the UI design aspect that potentially having labels on the tiles as is could cause issues where we have long device names?

48

Yeah. I bet thats why they haven’t put them in yet… You’d have to limit the characted count. I don’t think thats a problem, people will probably get used to it. //cough//twitter//cough// lol

1 Like
49

Yup … I think this is “easily” solved by adding an attribute to Device Class: “device.shortName” (to be input by the User when adding / configuring the preferences for a Device).

Note, however, that Device already has two different attributes: “device.name” and “device.label”; and the alias “device.displayName”:

…CP/Terry.

50

Agree its manageable through code cough twitter cough.

Anyway its doable so we at least have it even if restricted I think it should just happen especially as it’s a sought after feature request.

Maybe the ST team is re doing the whole UI they just havent told us.

And sorry I have to say this but ST really need to hire a community manager to respond one way or the other to the forum and requests. Even if its a we hear you comment it would help alot.

51

Add another pig that lost its oink (disgruntled) customer - - mostly surprised that it didn’t jump out at the ST designers when they were wireframing the app that the interface was really crippled … I had early problems where the icon I selected wouldn’t ‘stick’ but that resolved by itself. Another option would be to create your own icon from a bitmap but couldn’t find a way to do that …

1 Like
52

First post here. I am a new ST user. If the dev team isn’t reading this thread and this post in particular, they should question their leadership. Would it kill them to let us create our own custom library of things icons? This post in particular has done 85% of the research for them, all they have to do is build it. Shaking is silly, stupid gadgetry and should ALWAYS have an on/off button. Who’s shaking their device? I am not even going to start on the setup process being mobile-only, inconsistent support, or the relative instability of the service. UI improvements should be coming several times a year or they are not listening to their customers. Maybe Samsung will do it.

53

Hi shroom! – Welcome to our humble Community!

I personally disagree with “overly frequent” updates to any software, perhaps because I’m a bit “old school” and come from environments with full release cycles rather than Continuous Integration.

Everytime I see “Update Available” in my list of Android Apps or my Firefox or Chrome version, I get a tiny anxiety attack that something is going to break and/or something part of my routine interactive flow is going to change in a major way. I still run Office 2007 – definitely not Office 365.

But … I am adapting and starting to see the value; especially for bug fixes (hopefully well tested for side-effects!) and for fast deployment of “uncontroversial” UI improvements and incremental added / isolated features.

If you browse the history of “Label on Tile Previews” scattered throughout this Forum (I’ve brought it up 3 or 4 times, and have others … January 2014 example: SmartThings Icons - #11 by genekend); you’ll find that SmartThings considers this to be a debatable (i.e., controversial) and/or ignorable lower priority issue.

We really don’t know why this is the case.

It is also notable that you should mention “custom icons”:

There is a thread that implements that via workaround (a lot of clever hackers and developers here), but the current tail end of the thread is coincidentally dangling with a post in which I raised this question…

In other words, you’re not alone.

I cannot emphasize enough, however, that a lot of us (and I’m speaking not as any sort of official leader or representative – “us” is just a visible subset of the Community), are very appreciative of even the opportunity to vent our concerns in a public forum and have felt (and experienced) that prominent members of SmartThings (including @Alex - Founder/CEO, @Ben, @Urman, @Jim, @Tyler, …) listen and hear what we are saying. Certainly, they aren’t visibly acting on quite a few of the requests or problems they hear, but, they do listen and hear, which is more than we can say for most corporations out there, in this industry, and others.

…CP / Terry.

2 Likes
54

I am brand new here and just set up my system less than a week ago. I was actually surprised that this wasn’t a feature. It should be there by default to help with management. I see it more as a necessity than a nicety when I start adding more.
That being said I am very happy so far with the system and glad I chose SmartThings!

5 Likes
55

I’m a fairly new user (a couple weeks) and just wanted to agree with everyone that labels are important (without shaking)!

2 Likes
56

Genius. I just set up my ST Hub and integrated my TCP lights and was discouraged to see all the icons are the same. Who knew you just had to “Shake it off” Thanks!

57

I sure do dislike shaking my phone to see the labels…

I keep hoping this gets fixed before I spend a few hours making custom graphics for my 30 devices…

4 Likes
58

@April

Can you give us your thoughts on this?:):slight_smile:

59

Something exciting is on the horizon.

5 Likes
60

Does this go tandem with the Hub V2 App Refresh I’ve been hearing about?

1 Like