Who designed this UI?

[tgauchat (ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)]

@alui

We still finding a balance between big lift like that …

Pardon me sounding facetious, but why is changing “shake to view labels” into some other simple option like a toggle switch or a preference option for just brute force label overly, such a big deal? I honestly ask this with zero sarcasm. I just would like to understand … and would like to empathise with ST and the team.

I know … there have been a dozen forum threads on exactly this topic, but never an answer that explains why it is either controversial and/or difficult.

Once it’s fixed, the explanation will no longer be required or relevant. But in the meantime, you have a very curious Community. I am personally curious, just to help me understand the complexity that a company like SmartThings faces in designing and maintaining just one portion of their product (the Mobile Apps).

For reference:

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

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.

And older:

Smartthings: I'm sick of this sh*t! Shape up!

I strongly feel that Shake is really not an acceptable user interface, imho… It is not intuitive, nor is it labelled (i.e., there is no way to know that shake is available to perform the described function… the Things screens do not say “Shake to view labels”). To the best of my experience, I can think of only a handful of apps that use shake anywhere in their user interfaces (one example, perhaps, are music players that use shake to switch to a random track: If this is intuitive, then I would expect shake to cause SmartThings to turn on a random switch…). Android devices are not required to have shake as a mandatory hardware function. In an extreme case, we can be running the SmartThings app from inside Chrome or via an Android emulator (“Andy” or “BlueStacks”). My PC gets a tad u…

And older still… (August 2013!!!):

User interface

@urman (and @solardave1): Really PRO tip: If your GUI client device is a tablet mounted on the wall, it is handy to live near a major earthquake fault in order to periodically reveal the device labels. {Heck, if you’re really lucky, the wall might fall 90% and give you a functional landscape mode.} I’m a straight-talker, and I must be annoying as frack quite often… So pardon if I hurt anyone’s feelings: “Shake the device”, is, IMHO, IMHO, IMHO – NOT A VIABLE GESTURE / USER INTERFACE CONTROL OPTION. No no no! (Seriously, even if the device is a phone and not attached to the wall, “shaking” just looks ludicrous, it is not accessible (i.e., not ADA compliant to the best of my knowledge…), and takes inordinate amount of energy. The correct interface?: Please offer a pull-down or click-togg…