Please bring back the original dashboard (Things Tile View)

The bigger they are, the bigger they fail.

Seriously, there’s no “Customer Focused” excuse for the poor design. SmartThings invited folks to user feedback sessions. Did no one who attended notice these issues or did the final designers ignore feedback?

There is a story out about how Apple sent their mouse design team back to the drawing board when its new internal lighter battery resulted in it “sounding” different from an entirely subjective perspective. That’s taking UX serious and why Apple is know for great design. They don’t always get it right, but… Well, let’s say SmartThings has a long way to go.

Except that Apple had no sponsor users who used the Keyboard so today, I can’t use all the office shortcuts I know and MUST take my hands off the keyboard every &^^@ sentence. SLOWS me down. So does an old Text based UI like ST. Whether 1 across or 4 across, if you make bad use of space for the sake of visual aesthetics, you will sacrifice real functionality.

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I know I am a power user and the general market is not - so, by definition, ‘design’ does not focus on my needs. But, I feel I am less alone here than in itunes. So, the idea that one hardcoded group called Rooms is the only generally accepted grouping is very bizarre to me. What about floors? lights? Door locks!? Temps? I can go on and on. I look at my Things across many dimensions every day. The contemporary way to do that is Tags… No? My real question is who will come out with the Next Gen UI Inovation on a little screen? LIsts and pages are old. Where is the 3d? Where is the Mind Map? Spin it around, click something to see what it relates to? Make it functional and Exciting. Grab attention. But, the same old lIttle Lists where you only vary the size of an icon, disrespect my UI space and we lose functionality each release? So yesterday.
/end rant
I apologize.

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Oh … don’t apologize. Your ideas are real innovations, unlike the direction that SmartThings took.

The Community had over 2 years with the V1 app and made a huge range of suggestions and recommendations, the vast majority of which did not make an impact into the design of V2 at all.

Companies like SmartThings have to balance the academic notions of their design and marketing teams with the common sense that real-world users are going to have a much less myopic and less biased view of the product and are likely to make valid recommendations. Or not … I didn’t create this incredible company from scratch and don’t know what will bring them long-term success.

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I liked your post, and meant it, but just also wanted to mention that it still needs to have an option for those of us who can’t touch the screen, whether because of vision challenges or hand control.

On an Apple device, this is easy, because of apple’s voiceover which acts as the interface between what’s presented visually and other inputs. This is baked into the OS, so it is a free toolset for every developer, if they’ll just use it. The UI could be a video of Hula dancers and flying torches and rainbow unicorns and a person who is blind could still select the one they wanted. If the programmer tagged the elements correctly. :rainbow:

Anyway, dancing icons and entertaining views are fine, but what really matters is whether the user can find the information they want in a timely and helpful fashion.

Just sayin’… :sunglasses:

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My 2 cents: I’m finding the UI of V2 mobile app much better than the old UI, and I disagree with all of the posts about it lacking this and lacking that and being half baked. I’m not referring to the entirely separate issue of some functionality of specific apps having changed, or perhaps missing. What I’m referring to is the use of the mobile app’s UI for what it was intended.

Rather than get into a debate about what a good HA UI should look like, I’d rather focus for one second on the concept of control vs. automation in HA (and please note that HA stands for Home AUTOMATION). A lot of the negative comments here concern the difficulty of using the UI for control. I maintain that control is not its primary intended use, but rather, the primary intention is to use the UI to setup and adjust the settings of one’s HA system. Those who are frustrated because they want a control interface, can get a nice control interface from SmartTiles, or get a Minimote, or an Echo, or a light switch. Being frustrated about this UI not being good as a control interface is barking up a tree, IMO. The same comment applies to those wanting this UI to be a display interface for the state of one’s HA setup, and being frustrated that it doesn’t display things the right way all on one page. That was not the design goal.

What I find about this new interface that makes it effective and well designed, is that it is always the same navigation steps to get to where you want to adjust something or set something up. It’s always two steps down to a device detail, it’s always two steps up to the top menu. The UI is quite consistent in this regard. There is consistency about where details can be drilled into, and about where settings can be found. They have cleaned up most of the weird little things where it took you up one level higher than it should when you complete a task. For the purpose of setting up and maintaining my setup, there is very little to complain about from my perspective. I have a large setup with a fair amount of complexity. I find this UI allows me to traverse any part of it using the same steps each time. That is a good UI.

Obviously, @JDRoberts has a unique set of challenges when it comes to any UI, and I don’t for an instant pretend to be able to see things from his perspective. I know that he’s speaking from experience about how Accessibility features of an OS can go a very long way for someone in his situation, or for a blind person, if app developers support those Accessibility APIs. I hope that ST does those things well, but even that is a separate issue. My 2 cents.

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my biggest problem is the app freezing on my galaxy 5 I need to kill it at least 60 times a day… I cannot do anything for more than a minute before it freezes

@Lgkahn,

Please, if you haven’t done so already - email support@smartthings.com with what you just said. Many people, me included, are having this major problem since the initial release of the app. I can barely keep the app running for no more than a minute.

In case you haven’t emailed in a support ticket, the root cause seems to be a memory leak issue with Android 5.0.1, but I have another device on 4.4.x with the same problem. There is no short term fix from what I’m being told.

@slagle, here’s another case to note.

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Having the same issue @johnconstantelo and @Lgkahn. I’ll send an email to support as well.

I emailed them … but I have many other emails too them and am not holding my breath… they seem to be overwhelmed and basically just blow off most reports.

I wouldn’t say “blow off” but yeah, customer based jumped a lot with V.2 hub from what I understand. Add in that they need to support a lot of customers moving from V.1 to V.2 as well as supporting customers in UK and Ireland as well as needing to fix Oauth for the previously mentioned countries, and yeah, they are overwhelmed.

I don’t expect that this will be high on their list of issue especially because it’s probably a difficult, nitty-gritty thing that will take time to ferret out what’s wrong and how to fix it, but the more data we can provide them (Phone model, version of rom, and thing else that might help) the better I guess.

By the way @johnconstantelo, I’m running 4.4.4, so it doesn’t appear to just be a 5.0.1 issue. I did mention that in my email to them.

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@Lgkahn : that’s crazy. My Droid Turbo never freezes on the new app. Actually, never had an issue, though it (sometimes) will for close, with no error… but that’s 1-5x a week, a non issue, seeing as how far the app has stabilized and functioned faster than previous versions back in the early 1.0 days.

Which is why I’m telling ST not to hang their hat on it’s just related to 5.0.1, so thanks for sending in a ticket.

I’d disagree completely with that statement, except to say the very early versions. I’ve gone back to 1.7.6 on all devices except 1, and that version is rock solid. There are some things that can’t be done, for for the most part I’ve gone back to relying on that much more stable version than anything released with 2.x

From the second the app was released (maybe even sooner BTW), I had a support ticket in with ST about this very issue. This issue and the issue of not being able to add others, are the only really issues I’m having.

Support got back to about it stating it didnt install correctly
Try removing and installing. Basically a hail mary

Lol,

What a freaking riot. For we’ll over 2 months this issue has existed, and that’s the best excuse I’ve heard so far.

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They left out the part about rebooting the phone after removing the app. That’s the miracle catch behind the defender’s back after the hail mary.

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I understand, I am thinking from my perspective as expected.
How we send input and how it is rendered should be two different things.
As an example, I use voice a LOT (on android).
Designed well, you should be able to control any rendering.

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Being a developer I can tell in my case it is not a memory leak. Not to say there are not memory leaks but mine is some kind of runaway CPU or busy wait that is tying up the.phone and freezing the app making it necessary to hit the bottom button, get totally out of the app and kill.it with a task killer. I cannot even scroll through the devices or lists when it happens. Ans one minute of run time is too quick for a leak. More like they are running down a list past a null pointer into never never land.

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When ST hangs on my s3, I see 120+MB & rising w/anywhere from 10 - 40% cpu before the ‘not responding’ message comes up.

Interesting. That’s the problem with android fragmentation in my opinion, or with how we all use the devices differently… probably the combination of both.

Best of luck on that!