Will the UI ever get better?

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Since everything is near 100% automated things like Dashboards, Switches, Buttons
are rarely used (but they do exist). My preference is to have very solid and stable
hardware/platform and HE definitely delivers this. Good and nice looking GUI is nice to
have but not very important.
From the other side all these cloud-based toys are ASOLUTELY no go regardless how
nice their GUI and/or apps.

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Were this an open source project, I certainly would! But in this case I am a customer, not a contributor.

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The screenshots are all directly taken in Safari mobile. The embedded browser was even worse.

Odd, I am an Android user with only iPads for testing, so I cannot replicate it, but we will get that fixed. Do you mind sharing your iPhone model, current operating system version and update version that your hub is running?

Hub is on 2.3.5.125
iPhone 13 mini on iOS 16.6.1

Nothing on latest and greatest, but nothing terribly dated.

Great, thanks, do you mind updating to 2.3.6 and see if the issue persists?

Totally agree for myself. But I'd like to have something I could recommend to friends and family who are less technical.

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There is so single solution that will meet all needs. And there is a place in the Home Automation world for those who are best served with cloud-connected offerings designed to work with HomeKit, Google Home, and Alexa.

I love HE too, but @trek has some good points and I know that the developers here are aware that the UI is the weak spot. Hopefully it's near the top of the TBD pile to get some love and attention.

I too rarely look at dashboards and have endeavored to make my home "smart" with rules making intelligent decisions automagically. But, there are plenty of users whose idea of a smart home is more about pushbutton control on phones and tablets and such. For these folks the UI is more important. I'm sure that in the future, HE will polish these things up.

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Ouch! I hope they don't grip too hard!! :wink:

As Bobby notes, always a question of resources available across prioritized tasks. I know that if the HE team asked me whether to throw money at nicer dashboards vs. almost any other product enhancement, dashboards lose, badly. I'm about automation, rather than display/management.

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I have found that if I use Homekit with the Home app on my devices, I have a very nice dashboard.
If the HE staff wasn't using it's resources to add all this Apple stuff them maybe they could update the UI to your specs. Resources are not limitless unless you are one of the big 3.

This fixed most of the layout issues! The only two remaining are if this page ends up in landscape view and returns to portrait, then this container doesn't resize:

And one minor quibble that even on portrait that container scrolls but it's not obvious there are is additional content:

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Yes indeed, and some of us started out that way because:

  1. those use cases were the priority and "acid test" to automate / oversee through HE

  2. we hoped the built-in HE supported UI/Dashboard environment would become better/richer/easier as and when our adoption of the HE platform became a "sure thing" ...and spending time on friendly "human controls & monitoring" was desired and thus unavoidable.

I still to this day do some things on the Device page that I could work up a Dashboard for...but the early experience building those wasn't pretty and looked like a rabbit hole of tweaking I wasn't willing to go down to get the end results I wanted. The creative Community has built some nice tools to augment the experience....but that's now how I believe this should be addressed.

This part of the system is one which I can totally understand being given less attention/polish initially, (given the evolution of the system and those developing it and quite frankly the type of folks that adopt it), but the big question years into system evolution....should this part still be less evolved ?

Is the type of customer that needs/wants a better experience in that respect not desired ?

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Personally I think all three are potential benefits to an improved UI, which would justify the expense, but I am not across all the details like HE staff are, so can't say with any confidence which way to go.

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Yes, every one of those questions are valid...

albeit sewn with the very same intangibles that those for whom "Command Line Interfaces were like a native language" wondered about.... eons ago when so much effort was starting to be spent evolving the early "User Interfaces", and look where user expectations are today.

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I hear you.
A big reason why I used the Smartly user app to make Dashboard prettier and am an avid user of HomeKit so my wife/family only deal with that native iOS UX.

My hope is the HE team hires a UX contractor to spruce things up and create a Design language they can run with. Would be a good investment IMHO.

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UI looks great to me. Then again I'm one of those who sets up automation and doesn't really go into the GUI that much.

I tried to like the HE dashboard when I started with the platform and found it terribly lacking, as you do. Once Joe Page's dashboard was released I jumped on it and have never been the least bit sorry. Frankly, I can't imaging HE coming up with anything that would get me to leave it.

But if you're an Apple type then it won't work for you.

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My use case is a 50/50 between automation and control/monitoring. The high-traffic areas, the offices, and the guestrooms are all automated. the one that isn't is our bedroom. I doubt it ever will be fully automated. just too many variables to account for. That being said, the dashboards we use are mostly monitoring, with the option to control when desired. That combination works well. Unfortunately, the native dashboards are way to rudimentary (I really hoped they would have made a move to takeover hubivue). Since I have switched away from Android, HD+ is no longer an option, though I did like it and used it when I was on Android.

As for the overall UI, yes it is somewhat dated, and I can think of several things I wish were different. At the end of the day, it works well. I would rather have a more basic UI that truly works, than a smooth fancy UI that has issues,

I could be really wrong or mistaken, but I seem to recall at some point in the past @bravenel indicated they knew the UI needed an overhaul, but that it would be a major project to do so.

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Another vote for Joe Page's HD+ Dashboard, It is regularly updated with bug fixes, UI updates and new features. He has even added Android Auto support. If you are looking for a good Hubitat Dashboard, I am not sure you can find one better. So for me, I would prefer the Hubitat team focus on other things as HD+ already has this covered. I think that is one of the great things about Hubitat, the community probably has already solved whatever issue you have.

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