Your Dashboard Ideas are Needed!

Do you know what would be just as nice as a custom dashboard and widgets, The singular hub promise that got Smartthings on the map. No Nest Support, which is probably the dumbest thing I have seen, yeah how about we let our home developers create their own way to access it. politics or not, way to drop the ball on that one. Heck maybe even support push commands to the echo, per example to play music when a routine is started. I know that might be a little to complex for Smartthings but we can only hope. Oh here’s another bright idea Multi condition commands, IFTTT has you beat there, but maybe you can get the slack out of your lazy development team and beat IFTTT to an IF ELSE command.

However I think everyone will agree what we expected from Samsung and Smartthings was not delivered and appears that management for the Smarthings department needs to be overhauled because development and more device integrations seems to be lacking worse than Intelligence in the presidential debates.

End Rant

Its hard to find good products and good work ethic.

I take that “sometimes” as 5-10 seconds is the best case scenario? At least that’s my current experience. Closer to 30 seconds seems to be the norm for me lately - if at all…

I would strongly advocate to get the application working consistently with usable performance before adding more things to it (even it is adding back things that used to be present and working in earlier versions).

Just my 2¢

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Just as a follow up, this video shows the HTML “Solutions” we want you to release ASAP, we will create our own dashboards!

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Hi Jenny (insert Marvin Gaye voice)

Not all of us want to or can create our own dashboards. Not everybody using ST is a code slinger. ST is advertised as ready for the mass public but in reality it’s not. I don’t have a clue how to write code. If I would have known that ST falls just short of requiring know of writing codes, I never would have bought it. I have to try to find apps developed mostly by the developers on the community here, that are doing an awesome job btw, to get apps that I need since ST has failed to really produce what they advertise. If you don’t know how to write code, ST can be very unfriendly.

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I’m also confused about what’s being asked re: the “dashboard experience.” Doesn’t the dashboard basically not exist anymore? Except for SHM? I haven’t upgraded from my v1 hub yet, so I still have “home and family,” “lights and switches,” “doors and locks,” and “damage and danger” on my dashboard in addition to SHM. But for anyone that upgraded to hub v2, didn’t that all disappear?

What is everyone in this thread complaining about?

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The old dashboard is not available to people who started with version two of the mobile app, which came out at the same time as the V2 hub, but was independent of it. Now all it shows is SHM.

If you delete all of the devices that are in any of your dashboard categories, then that group is removed from the dashboard and there is no way to get it back.

I still have one of my dashboard categories, but I lost another one.

https://support.smartthings.com/hc/en-us/articles/209060486-Dashboard-categories-Solution-Modules-FAQ

Are Dashboard categories still a supported feature?

No. With the introduction of the all-new SmartThings app in September, 2015, these Dashboard categories were deprecated and are no longer supported.

Any new Location created will not have the option of Dashboard categories.

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Exactly. So is @SmartThings_CX_Team asking us about the dashboard ST stopped supporting over a year ago? What people think of developer dashboards, namely smarttiles? Or something that doesn’t exist yet?

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I think he is basically saying…

Hey, we are thinking about adding this functionality back and we want some feedback if you are interested.

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If someone upgraded from hub v1 to v2, would all devices have to be deleted at some point? Making all previously available dashboards disappear?

Yes. Z wave and zigbee devices can only have one primary controller. So they had to be removed from the V1 before they can be added to the V2.

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Yes all of the above! We are exploring ways to improve the usefulness and functionality of a dashboard above and beyond what currently exists or previously existed. Understanding your current struggles/pain points, what you are ultimately trying to accomplish or solve will greatly help us create a better experience!

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There are many good comments in the following thread. Here’s my own post from a year ago:

How about allow community created dashboards?

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Just to add my two cents, I started with the V2 hub and have never used the previous layouts, but a lot of the older stuff looks a lot more usable to me than the current app.

First, I will say that I like some of the things the latest app update did (grouping smartapps and automations makes sense). The Marketplace also works well as is.

Now, as for improvements… I definitely think the Notifications section needs to be more obvious, so maybe having that on the dashboard where I can see the last few notifications would be great (this should be an option, not mandatory). Also, I don’t think “Family” makes a lot of send where it is under “Home”. I would much prefer having family moved into a dashboard group or in a “contact book” location similar to where the “notifications” tab is now. I have seen some screenshots that you guys started working on something like that.

In place of where “Family” is now, I would love to be able to have groups… different from “rooms” that would allow for things like doors, windows, plugs, lights, motion sensors, etc to be grouped how I want to group them. This type of thing would also make sense to have on the dashboard.

I love that the current Dashboard shows me an overview of the status of motion sensors and door and window sensors. Having those items condensed into groups and having the option to only show “open/active” sensors would be great so I wouldn’t have to sort through a huge list of items. Also, I would love the ability to interact with locks/doors that I can control directly from this menu. So if something is open I can close it easily/quickly.

I’m not a GUI designer, so I can’t give a lot of feedback as to how it should look, but I can give a few suggestions as to what I’d like to see:

  1. usable, it has to make sense and have the most important information up front, I expect “Dashboard” to be a high level overview that provides quick access to other things… right now it’s just SHM… that doesn’t make sense (and it has to load in a reasonable amount of time… right now it’s pretty slow)
  2. customizable, right along with suggestion number 1, everyone is going to consider different information important, so the option to enable/disable certain things is key here… grouping/ungrouping items and sorting groups/items in specific ways would be useful
  3. landscape mode
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How hard is this. Add locks and lights on the page with shm. If you make it look modern that would be good to. See one post up for details.

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Alright then. Asking people to email you ideas is great, but as @JDRoberts said you can do your own homework too in this forum to see what people have been saying since ST took the dashboards away.

I think most people’s key point is, everyone’s different and user customization is important.

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They wouldn’t be asking us if they had even the slightest clue as to what the competition offers. They’ve gone from leader to follower. Iris is riding their coattails right now and will likely overtake SmartThings in features before the end of the year.

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As much as I am disappointed with ST shortcomings, and for anyone who knows me on this forums…I post for and against ST on any given day. I really don’t think Iris is any better: The Only thing that really sets them apart from ST is their keypad which ST needs more than a DashBoard FIX! @Tyler can you get this thing done for us? We need a Keypad for wife approval. Dashboard V6 by http://www.smarttiles.click/ is almost out. Don’t build your own. Implement that one and give us a keypad instead.

https://youtu.be/8AxXcLsHy3A
https://youtu.be/IMzbrRCZhdY
https://youtu.be/5QPqW1J5L44

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As the longtime author of IrisUsers.com and the owner of the largest Iris system in existence when I switched, I agree. But the platform has continued to evolve and improve, if not slowly, whereas ST has largely stagnated in the 6 months I’ve had it.

The speed and reliability of ST is one area Iris has a ways go go.

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I would like the default screen (dashboard) when I open the app to show me critical devices that I choose. Lock status, door status, critical lights, garage doors, SHM status, Mode, etc. I hate having to go to each of my rooms to visually see that my various external doors are locked.

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