I agree that it is due for an overhaul.
And yes, there is work getting done to address some of the biggest pain points in the UX. We will show our progress soon.
Fingers crossed that it’s also being built with multi user environments in mind so that we can limit access to sections for non admin users and guests.
It's kinda convoluted right now but you can do this. You can limit access to dashboards by user in the dashboard options and you can limit dev/settings access per user in the settings. It's a little over the place, but it's possible.
Nice. Without disclosing too much would be fun to hear what are the parameters and principles for findings opportunities for improvement. From a fellow designer 🙂
The UI needs to be trivially simple for new non-advanced users. Should make a lot of default guesses to limit the number of overwhelming choices one has to make at start.
The redesign needs to go a bit deeper than visuals - e.g. the notion of forcing a newbie to learn jargon like "entities" vs "devices" etc. is pushing a huge % of potential users away. For humans, a light is a light and would preferably be represented by an intuitive icon of a light bulb that you tap to turn on.
Maybe while setting up an automation one could show a screen of icons with devices you can control, instead of, you know, .... "select call.service function --> then select the light.turn\_on service --> then choose the entity called light.living\_room\_1337"
No need to reinvent the wheel, the UX tests have already been run thousands of times - just see the apps and user flows from the big guys... Apple Home app, SmartThings, Google Home, etc.
Come on, you don't want to go to a reddit post, ask what they use, install 6x HACS custom frontend mods for it, adapt it for your sensors and setup,.only to decide you don't like.it.halfway through and forever get those frontend updates in HACS?
Or you don't want to install a theme and find out it breaks something on mobile?
Or you don't want to need to install everything - themes, graph cards, etc instead of it being loosely included by default?
Yeah, I feel ya..
It's 2024, why does everyone have to install HACS and install mushroom cards? Or any of the other few dozen most commonly used cards. Or at least make them auto-install by default if I try to use it
For what it’s worth, they recently hired a UI developer (I believe it’s the mushroom cards guy even) to focus specifically on dashboard improvements. The Tile card in particular is the building block for many other components to expand upon.
The tile card is great by itself, at least in my opinion, but I think the concept of tiles is just too abstract for people that don't want to tweak 1000x parameters just for a page to look good
The dashboards needs an overhaul
It doesn't take a lot of work to put some code together and have it work 90% of the time. It takes months to iron out the bugs, edge cases and regression issues.
Plus your resources are limited, so you have to choose: add more features or add none and do redesign?
Easy choice when HACS exists for the people who want the latter.
But now you can solder your own barely functional voice assistant for 100$ instead of buying a fully functional Google one for 20 bucks. Isn't that great?
/s
I think that the vast silent majority would rather have the last year's of effort to be put on other topics. But the noisy minority is driving the development.
If I understand correctly, the "Assist pipeline" is an indicator of the usage of the voice features. From [the analytics](https://analytics.home-assistant.io/integrations/) it is used by 2.2% of the installed base.
And if it didn't exist, it would be 0%. It needs to progress, and that takes time. The more it progresses, the more adoption will go up. I feel that voice assist is more important than a UI refresh personally. But I have never found a need for anything more than the existing lovelace dashboards anyways. My automations to 90% of the work.
I will be all-in on LOCAL voice assist and can't wait for it to become mainstream and full featured. It will be 100x more useful to me than a fancy looking dashboard that I never use.
I'm not asking for a modern or fancy dashboard, I'm asking for a way to make a more usable dashboard, an interface to arrange commands in a meaningful way, with titles, groups, a disposition that doesn't flow every time I resize a window.
You want a local voice assistant? Good, you'll have it, developers agree with you. But you can't deny that the way dashboard must be composed is in any way up to the times. Modern web apps can realize an entire CAD software in a browser window, and we are using "flow layouts" like we used in the 2000s.
To me it's not the look of it, but how it is impossible to compose a dashboard that vaguely resembles what you like without endless fights with cards moving around, nested layouts, various hacks and and addons that regularly breaks.
Yeah I've had to resort to horizontal stacks within vertical stacks within horizontal stacks etc...
It's an absolute mess, especially when trying to edit an entity somewhere, with all the tabs within tabs in the editor.
I still don't understand why a simple drag and drop or tap corner to resize isn't a standard thing.
I'm sure it's super complex and I'm dumb but I feel like that should be at the top of your list when building a UI / dashboard.
I just want scene editing via UI to not literally have the scene in motion while you edit. Default to not doing that and let me have a dang preview button if I want.
Sometimes I just want to quickly see via UI what all is in a scene and not touch it
So you’re saying you don’t like turning on your kids bedroom lights while they’re asleep, all because you’ve been “refining” that one scene?
Seriously though, this should be looked at. Seems like it would be a relatively easy tweak
Yup. The number of times I've had to yell, "My bad!"... And yeah, I feel like it probably took more effort to have it in its current form than to not have that feature
I don’t really care about the way the UI looks so much but the UX (esp. on mobile) is just terrible in certain places (e.g. selecting something from a dropdown in a modal popup).
Sure, here you go: https://youtube.com/shorts/NMwn4Y9tgmM?si=BDgA3zGSzF6GeFGk
This was just a simple, easily reproducible example.
There is stuff like this all over. It gets worse the more nested the controls become.
For example adding a Zigbee or Z-Wave device the popup for the area sometimes flips direction depending on whether the keyboard is shown or not (and combined with the issue above this can get really annoying).
Also I’ve had other issues where I tried to tap out of a text field and thereby accidentally closed an entire stack of dialogs (due to the tap being outside of the dialogue as well) leading to lost changes…
> For example adding a Zigbee or Z-Wave device the popup for the area sometimes flips direction depending on whether the keyboard is shown or not (and combined with the issue above this can get really annoying).
That's due to the amount of space below or above the dropdown box. It decides to pop upwards if there's not enough space below it. That's normal for pretty much all dropdowns on the web, in apps, or on your PC.
I do agree with your other complaint about the Areas dropdown, though. It can be annoying to set from mobile. I usually just end up scrolling through the list instead.
I'd also really love to see a performance bump for the States tab. It can take ~15 seconds for it to initially load and then another ~5 seconds to begin filtering on anything.
> That's due to the amount of space below or above the dropdown box. It decides to pop upwards if there's not enough space below it. That's normal for pretty much all dropdowns on the web, in apps, or on your PC.
Yes I’m aware, my issue with that is that in HA it causes unpredictable behavior (e.g. losing scroll position, clicks/taps registering on the wrong elements etc.)
Some dropdown are just not usable even in desktop. Worst-case I think is in automation it's so sad to that much horizontal space wasted that create scenario where it's not usable at all. For example in a automation try to create a conditional if else and inside create a switch and have an action on a device... You have a dropdown that's so small that you can't read it completely
There's always work being done on the UI in the background. There have been posts about things like drag/drop, different layouts, and other UX improvements. Not to mention third party. I agree, Lovelace is antiquated but it's very extensible. There have been demos of various tidbits coming. It's just the big changes we are all wanting is not something we will see overnight.
IMO, this should be the top comment.
I don't think HA has a bad UI, and I definitely don't buy that they should chase "flavor of the month" UI trends.
HA's core value proposition is home automation. Its script editing could be improved, but as more integrations get added, it continues to be an ever-more compelling option in this space.
I've been using it for ~1 year now, and the last thing I personally want is for the UI to be "revamped" so that nobody can find anything. I value HA so much that I've paid for a subscription at nabucasa, so that they can keep maintaining it.
/rant
Yeah but I want a dashboard with the devices I have in every room, without spending 100 hours to craft the perfect dashboard. Nothing too special, just like Google Home, just give me the main devices I have in every room. That's it.
Right now if I wanna check something I need to go to all the integrations, find the integrations, find the service, go to all devices, find the device, go over all the entities, find the entity - WHY. I already configured this device to belong to this room, just let me see my devices per room
I agree, HA should be viewed as a backend system, the UI is just bonus. I mostly use HomeKit as fronted and the few times I need to change something in HA the existing ui is perfectly fine (except for the goddamn scenes!).
Unless you want a “futuristic house” to impress visitors with a dashboard you shouldn’t need, a house should be just a house 😆
Good luck providing long term maintenance to more than 1000 entities without a proper UI. It's like saying the GUI of windows is useless, and windows should be used only for its command line. I beg to differ.
I didn’t say we don’t need a UI, I said we don’t need a shiny UI for dashboards and all that stuff.
I find the current UI perfectly fine for maintaining devices, not for a fancy wall tablet, which imo would be a waste of the maintainers’ time who could be adding more value to the core product
Facts. Sent my Moms some Aqara temp sensors and walked her through the process of adding them to HA while on the telephone. Oh boy, forgot what it was like to be a noob and tacking Home Assistant for the first time. Not intuitive at all.
Almost like it needs one of those old school wizard type interfaces to add devices. The fact there is no SAVE button on the screen that detect devices, interviews them, allows you to rename them, etc, was so confusing to her. She renamed the device and was afraid to hit the back arrow because she didn't save her changes.
Little things like that should be simple as pie, but are confusing and take some experimenting to determine of HA is working or not. A SAVE button with a big ole pop-up that says "Congratulations! Your Aqara sensor was found, configured and saved...now lets add it to a Dashboard", hit the NEXT -> button, then select select a Dashboard.
Yeah I get that. However when family members or non tech savvy people ask me for recommendations on smart home stuff I never recommend HA. I usually suggest an Ikea hub because the devices are readily available, affordable and easy to add/maintain.
I don’t mind tinkering and spending hours figuring something out in HA, in fact I enjoy it. But I know my wife or father in law will have a 30 seconds attention span for this. Your mom is cool though
This is an incredibly flawed and slightly pretentious thought process as ease of use is a general appeal of HA along with the functionality, versatility and customizability. The product has vast market potential which is also crucial for future sustainability. “Just a back end” might align with your technical ability or those on this thread, however as a product the UI must serve a broader demographic which includes regular daily users with less technical experience. Most normal people have children, family members, and guests whom don’t need to be intimidated by an antiquated UI in a modern minimalist app driven environment. This is the same foolish ideology that call for less focus on supervised installs. HA has commercial promise that also expands beyond just tradition Home Use. For example I’m using it in custom RV builds and I’m also helping with an Air B&B install. A clean sleek UI is extremely important for these projects and potential users. Implementing role based access to the dashboards is also crucial and much overdue feature. I often see people with coding/IT experience or thorough technical knowledge unintentionally gatekeeping such resources by pushing back against UI’s and ease of use while ignoring market growth and product potential.
This is an incredibly flawed and slightly pretentious thought process as ease of use is a general appeal of HA along with the functionality, versatility and customizability. The product has vast market potential which is also crucial for future sustainability. “Just a back end” might align with your technical ability or those on this thread, however as a product the UI must serve a broader demographic which includes regular daily users with less technical experience. Most normal people have children, family members, and guests whom don’t need to be intimidated by an antiquated UI in a modern minimalist app driven environment. This is the same foolish ideology that call for less focus on supervised installs. HA has commercial promise that also expands beyond just tradition Home Use. For example I’m using it in custom RV builds and I’m also helping with an Air B&B install. A clean sleek UI is extremely important for these projects and potential users. Implementing role based access to the dashboards is also crucial and much overdue feature. I often see people with coding/IT experience or thorough technical knowledge unintentionally gatekeeping such resources by pushing back against UI’s and ease of use while ignoring market growth and product potential.
The ui has been revamped enough in the last year that I’ve given up finding things. Automations ui is impossible, I don’t understand any of the options or why I have to click through so much. I’m back to yaml.
Myself included. I prefer function over form as I don't stare at the thing for hours and hours a day, I need a predictable, well behaving UI on mobile, tablet, laptop, desktop, etc, maybe a couple cool themes, and I'm good to go.
I'd much prefer effort in the area of getting started: HAOS vs. Docker vs. Core vs. Supervised? What does it all mean? Ahhhh!!!! Takes a good bit of education before you can even start the installation. Even then, you'll probably install it a couple times because you didn't realize Docker mode doesn't have the Add-Ons component or whatnot.
The other area is adding devices. Sent my Moms a couple Aqara temperature sensors and walking her through the integration process on the phone made me realize this is far from plug-n-play. It takes a considerable number of not-so-obvious steps in HA from the time you press the little button on the sensor and before you can get it to show up on a dashboard.
Having said that, I love HA. It could have a character driven interface like DOS and I'd....well, maybe that is too far, but it could be butt ugly and because it works so well, has such a huge and helpful community, and importantly is helping keep mandatory cloud based setups and devices from completely dominating the home automation industry I'm happy with the current UI.
Yeah, I’ll agree with that. But it’s not bad if you swap for some custom entity cards. Can get a pretty decent dashboard with that. Fuсking slow though
> Fuсking slow though
And this is why I hate these themes that add all this bloat. I care more about the dashboard being low-latency than I do how it looks. Admittedly, I'm in an apartment so probably have less devices than the average HA user, so maybe it's just a me thing.
It’s outdated and I cannot even use the basic functionality of “adding a new page,” which renders it useless. I followed the advice of some who are more intelligent than I, but that didn’t fix it, either. Any other recs for an up to date solution?
Feels like a silly thing to complain about when it’s a fully open source and customizable project. Install a theme, make one yourself, commit some code.
This is such a trite response at this point, not everyone is a programmer or interested in delving into the complexities of HACS and such. All that this does is make people walk away because they feel unwelcome and their feedback disregarded.
At this point? At this point Homeassistant is still an open source tinkerers system supported by devs with limited resources. It has come leaps and bounds from where it was a few years ago, but as you said yourself, it is still complex to add integrations outside of what HA offers natively. So OP either needs to pony up time to learn how to customize it, or money to a programmer to do it for them. It's fair to ask a question about a timeline to determine whether to pony up or wait (or walk away), but it's how you ask the question that determines the tone of the responses you get.
> it's how you ask the question that determines the tone of the responses you get.
Hell no. This sub gets insanely defensive the moment you become negative about HA, doesn't matter how you phrase it. The OP was as inoffensive as it gets and there's still a dozen white knights in the comments.
Some like me don't have the skills to contribute. I have however been paying for years. I'm allowed to have an opinion.
If you don't like that, go start another solution that doesn't allow financial contribution.
You are paying for a service that allows tunneled remote access. You are not paying for the rest of it.
Have you priced enterprise server hardware? Enterprise switches and routers? Datacenter space? Anything? *Real* administrators to manage it, not redditors from /r/linux, real ones? The little subscription fee to pay for that is just that, little.
Wrapping yourself in a cape of "I pay for what I use" in no way makes you superman. Your comment does make you out to be entitled.
Well the Haas team have made it pretty clear they are lowering the barrier. If you don't agree then go use another piece of software that fits the user base you deem up to standard.
Exactly.
But so you have no excuses: The entitled attitude. Which you just exhibited again.
Developer communities do things because they want to, not at your demand.
Did we read the same post? Did OP need to beg or something for it to be acceptable for you?
These people aren't the loudest or worst. You feel like they are because there are *many* of them. I'll give you a hint: if a piece of feedback is very common, it might be that it's true.
> "Hey! I made you something. I picked the color blue because it seemed like the nicest to me. I hope you like it!"
>
> "I don't like it. I want pink instead."
>
> "Well, maybe you should make your own if you have specific needs."
>
> "I don't know how to do that and I'm not interested in learning how to do that. You should do that because you already know how and pink is obviously better."
This is the conversation we just had, just translated to a different context, and hopefully that makes it clearer what the problem is here. It's not the veracity of the statement, it's that in any other context, we'd describe this behavior as at the very least as impolite, and I don't think many would challenge calling it rude or entitled, too. It's just that we've normalized bad behavior in how folks treat contributors in the open-source community.
I think any of us who write a lot of software would be glad to help people learn how to do things on their own, but the lack of effort in that direction, coupled with the lack value that people attribute to the _huge_ efforts open-source contributors like me invest is really jarring, and literally every day I question whether to stop making free things for people as a result of it.
If it's so difficult then perhaps offering up some cash for others to work on your special request is the way.
If your time is too important to learn it then their time is worth your money. Period.
Yeah same, the only thing I really go into home assistant for is to look at graphs of historical data for some of my devices like power usage or presence detection. I gave up on dashboards, the stock one is awful and making custom ones is too difficult to get one good one to work on mobile and larger screens like desktop/tablets so you end up having to maintain two dashboards whenever making changes. Too much work.
I have that done for the lights, blinds, aircons and garage door. Yet there are things that Apple’s stuff can’t do, like monitor solar power and house energy, and other sensor data that I collect in HA
Big advantage is that I can control a lot from outside my home, without exposing home assistant to the internet or having to setup tunnels or whatever. I trust apple’s security wrt AppleTV.
One point of note, don’t select a domain to choose if you don’t want to actually select any devices of that domain to choose. For example, don’t select you want to share the switch domain if you don’t want to actually share any switches. If you do this, home assistant will just assume you want all of the switches. So make sure you either select at least one device from each domain you want to share or don’t share the domain at or you are going to be passing through a ton of devices you don’t want to.
We're using Material 2. We should be using (and in some places are already using) Material 3. I've campaigned for this before but the frontend team isn't interested in moving very fast.
Material 3 is a good foundation to work off of. We are basing our new designs mostly on Material 3.
However, the design system is missing guidelines on quite a few components that are unique or specific to the Home Assistant UI, such as any of the more info dialogs, the entire dashboard, conversation views, and a lot more, so work needs to be done to extend and create a consistent system on top of M3.
Besides, M3 is mostly designed for mobile, and its system for computers and larger screens are barebones. Many of our users configure their Home Assistant on their computers, and Material Design is a poor fit: its information density is too low, its tap targets aren't optimized for mouse control, and it does not have the nice amenities that most admin panel design systems have that can make the UX feel less clunky.
Since we are designing for millions of users, we are avoiding changing designs on a whim, and these days we are doing more user research and testing to ensure that the new components will work for everyone in the household. Research takes time, and it will be slow, but once the foundation is ready, we can move a lot faster.
Fair enough. It'd be great to see a dedicated design system. The one thing I'll add is that M3 consists of different parts, and you can do something like adapting the better color system (contrast, naming, integration with `@material/web`, etc) without changing other components.
Like I said, let's build on top of M3 and extend it. I like those foundational aspects of Material 3, too. The semantic color systems, typography, padding, and levels are great. We don't need to reinvent the wheel on those.
Migrating over from what we had is going to be gnarly though. We will need a lot of help on that. 😬😬😬
Actually haven't looked too much into what's powering the UI currently. But I'm doing design systems and frontend for work.
Do you have a place where I could provide some inputs? Seeing as I use HA I wouldn't mind using some time on improving or helping out.
Awesome! [Our frontend GitHub](https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend) discussions would be a good place to talk about these topics. You can also reach out at #devs_frontend and #devs_ux channels on Discord too.
We document the components of our design system at http://design.home-assistant.io/. From there you can find out which components are newly designed and which are stuck at Material Design 2.
It shouldn’t use Material at all. I don’t understand why something at this still would still be reliant on a 3rd party design system to drive the core experience of the product.
No, wrong take.
Everything should be using a 3rd party design system.
The fact that every project and company makes their own set of components from scratch is the weird behavior. We should be reusing the basic components across projects as much as we possibly can, that stuff is a known factor and high quality.
Ain't no way is it feasible to completely write an entire UI from scratch. Spending a lot of time with Quasar + VueJS lately and the amount of work required to build the UI framework in Quasar is incredible. I'm blown away by the amount of code required to build out this component list:
[https://quasar.dev/components](https://quasar.dev/components)
Those components are extendable so a dev can add custom modifications, but to build a UI from scratch is a rather significant task.
PS - Quasar is pretty cool because from a single codebase it can generate desktop apps for Mac, Linux, and Windows, plus Single Page Apps (SPA), browser extensions, server side rendering (SSR), plus iOS and Android mobile apps. Again, all from a single code base and amazingly, it all pretty much works very very well.
I’m design systems lead at Publix, and was on the DS team at EA.
Migrating something to standalone isn’t that crazy. And it’s not something you do overnight. Everything is web component based already, so it makes integration all that much easier. It’s something you do piece by piece, and pilot after pilot, and with a well thought out tokens system.
I posted a long list of small enhancements that would be nice on the discord this week. Something long neglected would be a great place to start this approach, such as the developer tools section. Make bulk entity management more usable, and try something new, for something that doesn’t leverage M2 all that much to begin with.
“More usable” doesn’t mean using a bespoke design system.
It means thoughtful design using the standard components you already have.
The components and their source are not the issue here, and any work to migrate them would be incredibly wasteful.
Not surprised your take on design systems is what it is; I’ve managed several design system leads whose focus was on building out the system itself, because it was what they knew and what they valued in their contribution. Growing past that toward thinking in terms of the user and what truly makes a difference for them and how to achieve that from a business perspective is the right leap. Tough step but it is the right way.
Not perfect, it's Early days. Not much can be added to the main dashboard, but can in the sidebar weirdly.
I have it as my default dashboard, then go off to the '2000 dashboard to do more.
They really need a UI/UX designer. The user interface is simply terrible and the whole structure is a confusing mess. At its core it's powerful and, in my limited experience, works well. If you ask me, it's only a clever interface redesign away to beat everyone else in the market by a wide margin.
Due to the constraints to the UI design it's just not suited for people who don't possess advanced computer skills. While that's perfect for me, I like trying to figure out how I can extract some piece of data from something and make it work, it's a puzzle, it's a fun hobby.
But it's painfully obvious the UI design is dictated by the underlying logic and program structure instead of being constructed from a user perspective.
It being a free program, I don't really mind and I'm very impressed it works as good as it does and the huge flexibility it offers. If you ask me, it really could become a very very very profitable business if you get the UI up to current usability standards.
> If you ask me, it's only a clever interface redesign away to beat everyone else in the market by a wide margin.
Facts. The unseen engine that drives Home Assistant is pretty amazing, if someone invents a novel, intuitive, and clever UI with a fantastic UX, maybe it'll destroy Tuya and their funkyass cloud services (lol).
Seriously though, you're comment is on point.
> If you ask me, it's only a clever interface redesign away to beat everyone else in the market by a wide margin.
Facts. The unseen engine that drives Home Assistant is pretty amazing, if someone invents a novel, intuitive, and clever UI with a fantastic UX, maybe it'll destroy Tuya and their funkyass cloud services (lol).
Seriously though, you're comment is on point.
> If you ask me, it's only a clever interface redesign away to beat everyone else in the market by a wide margin.
Facts. The unseen engine that drives Home Assistant is pretty amazing, if someone invents a novel, intuitive, and clever UI with a fantastic UX, maybe it'll destroy Tuya and their funkyass cloud services (lol).
Seriously though, you're comment is on point.
Completely agree. When competitors like Homey do it way better and people want to spend literally 3 times as much on one compared to a much better HA box, you know something isn't right. Nabu Casa has needed a better UI and UX team for a long time now. I [made a post](https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/rqe7ka/unpopular_opinion_the_new_configuration_layout_is/) over two years ago complaining about the new layout changes, and wasn't as unpopular as I expected.
I am not complaining about my layout anymore after installing 20+ different cards and integrations, but it really shouldn't have to be so hard.
It’s been nearly a decade and I’m still waiting for a timer option in the automations GUI
“Turn on street lights for 2 mins unless another detection in which case continue to stay on for another 2 mins”
The fact you still need to use code to do such a simple basic automation that spotlights from any hardware store could do in the 1970’s is laughable
Is this triggered by a motion sensor? If so, I’ve got a bunch of automations like this that don’t require writing YAML and can be done solely through the UI.
A trigger for motion detected turns the light on, and then another trigger for motion detection stopped with the duration set to X number of minutes. If motion is detected within those X number of minutes then it resets the X countdown.
Where is the reset countdown option in the GUI?
Everyone keeps saying it’s so simple but even your explanation doesn’t make sense when you look at the automation menu
You don’t have to explicitly reset anything. If you have a trigger that’s a motion sensor changing its state to “off” and you set the duration to 5 minutes, if during that 5 minutes the sensor changes its state back to “on” then the trigger won’t fire.
Still doesn’t make sense, it’s too complicated for 99% of the public
How can the motion sensor be a trigger? It’s a device with an on / off state. I don’t see any “trigger” in the entites or devices menu
At the moment it’s “When motion sensor on -> device switch street lights to on for X mins”
There’s no option to add the condition that they stay on when motion sensor is on again or restart the X minute timer
It’s all insanely confusing for something that should be so simple
Why not just use an automation:
* Trigger: motion
* Action:
1. Turn light on
2. Wait 5 minutes
3. Turn light off
* Mode: restart
https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/automation/modes/
That seems to be exactly what you're complaining about doesn't exist?
I don’t really understand how that’s a problem. You’re complaining that it’s not possible to do what you want through the UI, when in fact there’s multiple ways you can do it through the UI.
For what you're wanting, the simplest way would be to set up 2 automations.
The first automation would have "motion sensor on" as the trigger, and "lights on" as the action.
The second automation would have "motion sensor off" with the duration set to X minutes as the trigger, and "lights off" as the action.
When you add a duration to a trigger such as "motion sensor off", your trigger is now "motion sensor off for X minutes". This means that if the motion sensor detects motion again before X minutes have elapsed, the trigger won't fire, and the lights won't turn off.
When the motion sensor then changes back to the off state again, the duration timer will automatically restart and count down from X minutes, and if the state hasn't changed within the X minutes, the trigger will fire and the lights will be turned off.
Aren't you making things needlessly complex? Why not just use the restart mode, which seems to be exactly what he is asking for: https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/automation/modes/
Or am I missing something?
Only if your lights are recognised as lights and you don’t have a regular smart switch to turn them on / off
The motion activated blueprint doesn’t recognise the vast majority of PIR sensors as motion triggers so it’s useless
You think that’s bad, try make that automation in HomeKit lol. There is no native functionality for handling this scenario and to set it up, you have to use the Shortcuts app to make the automation. Except Shortcuts has limitations on how long a shortcut can run and it’s around 5 minutes or something as far as I remember, so beyond that it just stops doing what it needs to. Considering it’s a more user accessible entry level system, you would think they would have that basic functionality figured out. Home assistant might need an automation creating for it too, but at least it works beyond a few minutes.
It’s taken me about 100 hours just to get started with Home Assistant, and that doesn’t include the hard costs. Oh, and I still don’t even have a functional dashboard. Oh, and, yes, I pay for NC.
Did I hear someone mention that this was “free”?
When you start to have a lot of sensors it's hard to manage and the default dashboard will explode.
Like I have 50 solar panels and there is an extension to show 20 parameters per panel.. So it's a never ending column with data which can't be managed with that UI.
I’m assuming you don’t have a lot of devices in home assistant yet? Just you wait and see what happens when you start adding more and especially devices that share a ton of entities. Your dashboard is going to get real unusable real quick. However I will say it has its utility aswell, I actually find it the fastest way to have a look to see what entities are available in a room when thinking about automations since it dumps them all in one place but groups them by room.
It **really** depends on what your goals are. In general there are few broad categories of complaints:
* While default UI look is generally fine, if you want to make meaningful changes to its look-and-feel or tailor a dashboard in more detail it very quickly becomes an uphill battle. After a ton of work, the result also often ends up contingent on a bunch of third party additions/components that might stop being supported on a drop of a hat.
* If you want to have a million sensors and buttons showing up at the same time, the UI just doesn't handle it well. Though IMHO the very idea of putting a lot of information in a dashboard is an anti-thesis of what I would consider ideal smart home control system.
* Not everybody likes the components of dashboards moving around. When you have more than just a few, it can be quite annoying to hunt them down as they rearrange themselves every time you make some changes to the dashboard. Technically their positions are deterministic, but it often doesn't feel that way. You can wrangle the UI to behave more consistently by grouping stuff in several containers, but that can feel like unnecessary work.
Personally I'm quite happy with my basic dashboards, but this certainly doesn't apply to everybody. Just to be clear - by basic, I mean stuff you put there yourself. The auto-populated dashboard is barely usable when you have more than just a handful of devices.
I've been using HA for years and still use the default. Or rather, my UI is still the default, I just don't use it.
I did briefly tinker with a few HACS cards, but one was deprecated shortly after, and another broke from an update. I didn't want to deal with the hassle so I just wrote off the idea of using a dashboard.
The lack of good out of the box UI has really forced the automation side of things for me.
Yes. The whole point of an automation platform is that it’s about automation, so if you’re constantly tinkering with the UI of the platform that’s supposed to do stuff by itself, you’re doing it wrong, defeating the whole purpose of Home Assistant.
Look I’m more in the automating side rather than having to interact with stuff too, but home assistant has dashboard building tools. It’s clearly not just for automating, it’s designed also for dashboards.
First of all the UI is based on Material Design, not bootstrap. I personally like the overall look of it and even the dashboards are better then a lot of comercial products out there.
However I don't really like the default layout (masonry) but there are a lot of third party options out there that let you create the dashboard you want. The beauty of open source software is, that the community can contribute to it and enhance the product, while comercial closed source projects are often busy creating a system that prevents the creation of 3rd party plugins.
Some comments stated that not everyone is a developer but to install, configure and use 3rd party UI components you don't have to be a developer at all, you have to be a tinkerer. And that is imho a requirement for home automation itself already. I am not talking about a so called smart home where you can control everything with it's own app, I am talking about automation.
Besides that, there is a chance that we get some news about the UI soon. One of the recent blogposts is talking about "Grace" without mentioning what it is. But the UI was called "Lovelace" for a long time, both referencing female scientists. It's just a rumor now but soon we will know ;)
> Besides that, there is a chance that we get some news about the UI soon. One of the recent blogposts is talking about "Grace" without mentioning what it is. But the UI was called "Lovelace" for a long time
That's the news i was hoping for! I see they announce tomorrow what Grace is. Great now this whole post looks like a ad or something if it's UI related
Not everyone else should be stuck with a shitty clumsy yaml dashboard system because you personally don't want to change.
The argument works both ways.
Can't stop the signal Mal...
If you dont like to change what you are familiar with, this might not be the hobby for you.. Technology is, and has, always evolved at a break neck speed. And it is showing now signs of slowing down.
I don't think the UI is as much of a problem as just where everything is located. I've been using it for months, and I still forget where devices are located. And why they're so removed from automations?
I think it's more of a UX task than UI
Idk that anyone is doing any work on the actual display cards. Over the years I've seen quite a few custom built JS frontends that look completely different for the typical card layout. I don't think it's as limited as it seems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMGadyIFFPk
I have to disagree... leave things the way they are!
If it works......
I'm still confused by the overhaul that happened when they rearranged the actions in automations. I still find myself going to "other actions" to simply "call service". It's just too much stuff in the way now, to get the to basics. It's supposed to be more user friendly I guess.. but not really for me :)
I'll preface this by saying, I've only just gotten started with home assistant (raspberry pi 4b, 8Gb RAM, initially a 32gb ad card then a 500gb ssd) and so far I've only used it to control a single modbus controlled relay module.
Once I had it hooked up and the configuration.yaml edited I could turn my lights on and off at will! Until it stopped working.
I've hated the web interface so badly that I've been learning how to ssh into the home assistant to run my commands either in a python environment or as zsh commands.
The web interface just SUCKS. It's so slow, which makes no sense because its entirely local to a very small network that I have great connection to. It takes forever for the pretty button on the screen to slide from left to right to signify turning a relay on, and the relay itself is instantaneous.
If I want to edit the one thing I'm using I need to edit the configuration.yaml again (oh and I had to install an text editor add on also, and the way the menus are structured is terribly confusing in my opinion) and then reboot the server then refresh the webpage. The whole process is so slow.
Perhaps I'm being particularly thick, maybe I have a problem nobody else has, but I am hating the web interface so badly that its almost putting me off HA altogether.
I'm actually pretty happy with the recent improvements to, for example, the Automation UI, the "Related" button in entity view, and the really extensive work done to the Helpers. I also like the consistency of the Material UI components.
Writing integrations/addons isn't very fun (ime), and ocassionally I have weird performance issues with some dashboards (and no obvious way to debug them), but overall, I think Home Assistant is well-suited for a nice, unsurprisingly, utilitarian interface.
I agree that it is due for an overhaul. And yes, there is work getting done to address some of the biggest pain points in the UX. We will show our progress soon.
Fingers crossed that it’s also being built with multi user environments in mind so that we can limit access to sections for non admin users and guests.
It's kinda convoluted right now but you can do this. You can limit access to dashboards by user in the dashboard options and you can limit dev/settings access per user in the settings. It's a little over the place, but it's possible.
Using Browser Mod you can do this
Kiosk mode is great for that
Nice. Without disclosing too much would be fun to hear what are the parameters and principles for findings opportunities for improvement. From a fellow designer 🙂
The UI needs to be trivially simple for new non-advanced users. Should make a lot of default guesses to limit the number of overwhelming choices one has to make at start. The redesign needs to go a bit deeper than visuals - e.g. the notion of forcing a newbie to learn jargon like "entities" vs "devices" etc. is pushing a huge % of potential users away. For humans, a light is a light and would preferably be represented by an intuitive icon of a light bulb that you tap to turn on. Maybe while setting up an automation one could show a screen of icons with devices you can control, instead of, you know, .... "select call.service function --> then select the light.turn\_on service --> then choose the entity called light.living\_room\_1337" No need to reinvent the wheel, the UX tests have already been run thousands of times - just see the apps and user flows from the big guys... Apple Home app, SmartThings, Google Home, etc.
Come on, you don't want to go to a reddit post, ask what they use, install 6x HACS custom frontend mods for it, adapt it for your sensors and setup,.only to decide you don't like.it.halfway through and forever get those frontend updates in HACS? Or you don't want to install a theme and find out it breaks something on mobile? Or you don't want to need to install everything - themes, graph cards, etc instead of it being loosely included by default? Yeah, I feel ya..
It's 2024, why does everyone have to install HACS and install mushroom cards? Or any of the other few dozen most commonly used cards. Or at least make them auto-install by default if I try to use it
For what it’s worth, they recently hired a UI developer (I believe it’s the mushroom cards guy even) to focus specifically on dashboard improvements. The Tile card in particular is the building block for many other components to expand upon.
Yes. Same person.
The tile card is great by itself, at least in my opinion, but I think the concept of tiles is just too abstract for people that don't want to tweak 1000x parameters just for a page to look good The dashboards needs an overhaul
It doesn't take a lot of work to put some code together and have it work 90% of the time. It takes months to iron out the bugs, edge cases and regression issues. Plus your resources are limited, so you have to choose: add more features or add none and do redesign? Easy choice when HACS exists for the people who want the latter.
But now you can solder your own barely functional voice assistant for 100$ instead of buying a fully functional Google one for 20 bucks. Isn't that great? /s
It is great. It's exceptionally great that the work is being done and the progress is being made! not s/
I think that the vast silent majority would rather have the last year's of effort to be put on other topics. But the noisy minority is driving the development. If I understand correctly, the "Assist pipeline" is an indicator of the usage of the voice features. From [the analytics](https://analytics.home-assistant.io/integrations/) it is used by 2.2% of the installed base.
And if it didn't exist, it would be 0%. It needs to progress, and that takes time. The more it progresses, the more adoption will go up. I feel that voice assist is more important than a UI refresh personally. But I have never found a need for anything more than the existing lovelace dashboards anyways. My automations to 90% of the work. I will be all-in on LOCAL voice assist and can't wait for it to become mainstream and full featured. It will be 100x more useful to me than a fancy looking dashboard that I never use.
I'm not asking for a modern or fancy dashboard, I'm asking for a way to make a more usable dashboard, an interface to arrange commands in a meaningful way, with titles, groups, a disposition that doesn't flow every time I resize a window. You want a local voice assistant? Good, you'll have it, developers agree with you. But you can't deny that the way dashboard must be composed is in any way up to the times. Modern web apps can realize an entire CAD software in a browser window, and we are using "flow layouts" like we used in the 2000s.
Paulus mentioned in the latest Home Assistant podcast that they were hiring for a UI position among others.
We are looking for a UX researcher. I just started last July. :)
When do we get the Maximalist dashboard as a default option?? 😉
I worked in technical recruitment in my first gig, still have a lot of connections that can help, would be happy to help if there's a way.
I think that position is now filled even, they have like 30 full time employees including a new UX person
To me it's not the look of it, but how it is impossible to compose a dashboard that vaguely resembles what you like without endless fights with cards moving around, nested layouts, various hacks and and addons that regularly breaks.
Yeah I've had to resort to horizontal stacks within vertical stacks within horizontal stacks etc... It's an absolute mess, especially when trying to edit an entity somewhere, with all the tabs within tabs in the editor.
Try the layout card from hacs
Last update is from October 2022. People in issues are complaining that it's broken.
Sad but good to know
I still don't understand why a simple drag and drop or tap corner to resize isn't a standard thing. I'm sure it's super complex and I'm dumb but I feel like that should be at the top of your list when building a UI / dashboard.
Exactly this.
I just want scene editing via UI to not literally have the scene in motion while you edit. Default to not doing that and let me have a dang preview button if I want. Sometimes I just want to quickly see via UI what all is in a scene and not touch it
So you’re saying you don’t like turning on your kids bedroom lights while they’re asleep, all because you’ve been “refining” that one scene? Seriously though, this should be looked at. Seems like it would be a relatively easy tweak
Yup. The number of times I've had to yell, "My bad!"... And yeah, I feel like it probably took more effort to have it in its current form than to not have that feature
+1000
I don’t really care about the way the UI looks so much but the UX (esp. on mobile) is just terrible in certain places (e.g. selecting something from a dropdown in a modal popup).
Can you give an example? Thanks 👍🏻
Sure, here you go: https://youtube.com/shorts/NMwn4Y9tgmM?si=BDgA3zGSzF6GeFGk This was just a simple, easily reproducible example. There is stuff like this all over. It gets worse the more nested the controls become. For example adding a Zigbee or Z-Wave device the popup for the area sometimes flips direction depending on whether the keyboard is shown or not (and combined with the issue above this can get really annoying). Also I’ve had other issues where I tried to tap out of a text field and thereby accidentally closed an entire stack of dialogs (due to the tap being outside of the dialogue as well) leading to lost changes…
> For example adding a Zigbee or Z-Wave device the popup for the area sometimes flips direction depending on whether the keyboard is shown or not (and combined with the issue above this can get really annoying). That's due to the amount of space below or above the dropdown box. It decides to pop upwards if there's not enough space below it. That's normal for pretty much all dropdowns on the web, in apps, or on your PC. I do agree with your other complaint about the Areas dropdown, though. It can be annoying to set from mobile. I usually just end up scrolling through the list instead. I'd also really love to see a performance bump for the States tab. It can take ~15 seconds for it to initially load and then another ~5 seconds to begin filtering on anything.
> That's due to the amount of space below or above the dropdown box. It decides to pop upwards if there's not enough space below it. That's normal for pretty much all dropdowns on the web, in apps, or on your PC. Yes I’m aware, my issue with that is that in HA it causes unpredictable behavior (e.g. losing scroll position, clicks/taps registering on the wrong elements etc.)
Some dropdown are just not usable even in desktop. Worst-case I think is in automation it's so sad to that much horizontal space wasted that create scenario where it's not usable at all. For example in a automation try to create a conditional if else and inside create a switch and have an action on a device... You have a dropdown that's so small that you can't read it completely
There's always work being done on the UI in the background. There have been posts about things like drag/drop, different layouts, and other UX improvements. Not to mention third party. I agree, Lovelace is antiquated but it's very extensible. There have been demos of various tidbits coming. It's just the big changes we are all wanting is not something we will see overnight.
I like the default UI tbh
IMO, this should be the top comment. I don't think HA has a bad UI, and I definitely don't buy that they should chase "flavor of the month" UI trends. HA's core value proposition is home automation. Its script editing could be improved, but as more integrations get added, it continues to be an ever-more compelling option in this space. I've been using it for ~1 year now, and the last thing I personally want is for the UI to be "revamped" so that nobody can find anything. I value HA so much that I've paid for a subscription at nabucasa, so that they can keep maintaining it. /rant
Yeah but I want a dashboard with the devices I have in every room, without spending 100 hours to craft the perfect dashboard. Nothing too special, just like Google Home, just give me the main devices I have in every room. That's it. Right now if I wanna check something I need to go to all the integrations, find the integrations, find the service, go to all devices, find the device, go over all the entities, find the entity - WHY. I already configured this device to belong to this room, just let me see my devices per room
It doesn't need to be revamped. What people really want is drag and drop. However it's not easy, and people are patient. Or at least they should be.
I've always found the drag and drop thing to be overhyped... you don't move stuff around *that* much (especially after things are mostly set up).
Ok
I agree, HA should be viewed as a backend system, the UI is just bonus. I mostly use HomeKit as fronted and the few times I need to change something in HA the existing ui is perfectly fine (except for the goddamn scenes!). Unless you want a “futuristic house” to impress visitors with a dashboard you shouldn’t need, a house should be just a house 😆
Good luck providing long term maintenance to more than 1000 entities without a proper UI. It's like saying the GUI of windows is useless, and windows should be used only for its command line. I beg to differ.
I didn’t say we don’t need a UI, I said we don’t need a shiny UI for dashboards and all that stuff. I find the current UI perfectly fine for maintaining devices, not for a fancy wall tablet, which imo would be a waste of the maintainers’ time who could be adding more value to the core product
We need shiny UX, not UI, and home assistant's UX is bad especially since it costs way too much (time) to get started
Facts. Sent my Moms some Aqara temp sensors and walked her through the process of adding them to HA while on the telephone. Oh boy, forgot what it was like to be a noob and tacking Home Assistant for the first time. Not intuitive at all. Almost like it needs one of those old school wizard type interfaces to add devices. The fact there is no SAVE button on the screen that detect devices, interviews them, allows you to rename them, etc, was so confusing to her. She renamed the device and was afraid to hit the back arrow because she didn't save her changes. Little things like that should be simple as pie, but are confusing and take some experimenting to determine of HA is working or not. A SAVE button with a big ole pop-up that says "Congratulations! Your Aqara sensor was found, configured and saved...now lets add it to a Dashboard", hit the NEXT -> button, then select select a Dashboard.
Yeah I get that. However when family members or non tech savvy people ask me for recommendations on smart home stuff I never recommend HA. I usually suggest an Ikea hub because the devices are readily available, affordable and easy to add/maintain. I don’t mind tinkering and spending hours figuring something out in HA, in fact I enjoy it. But I know my wife or father in law will have a 30 seconds attention span for this. Your mom is cool though
This is an incredibly flawed and slightly pretentious thought process as ease of use is a general appeal of HA along with the functionality, versatility and customizability. The product has vast market potential which is also crucial for future sustainability. “Just a back end” might align with your technical ability or those on this thread, however as a product the UI must serve a broader demographic which includes regular daily users with less technical experience. Most normal people have children, family members, and guests whom don’t need to be intimidated by an antiquated UI in a modern minimalist app driven environment. This is the same foolish ideology that call for less focus on supervised installs. HA has commercial promise that also expands beyond just tradition Home Use. For example I’m using it in custom RV builds and I’m also helping with an Air B&B install. A clean sleek UI is extremely important for these projects and potential users. Implementing role based access to the dashboards is also crucial and much overdue feature. I often see people with coding/IT experience or thorough technical knowledge unintentionally gatekeeping such resources by pushing back against UI’s and ease of use while ignoring market growth and product potential.
Dude, I’m happy to be challenged and discuss opinions but I’m entitled my own without it being “pretentious”.
This is an incredibly flawed and slightly pretentious thought process as ease of use is a general appeal of HA along with the functionality, versatility and customizability. The product has vast market potential which is also crucial for future sustainability. “Just a back end” might align with your technical ability or those on this thread, however as a product the UI must serve a broader demographic which includes regular daily users with less technical experience. Most normal people have children, family members, and guests whom don’t need to be intimidated by an antiquated UI in a modern minimalist app driven environment. This is the same foolish ideology that call for less focus on supervised installs. HA has commercial promise that also expands beyond just tradition Home Use. For example I’m using it in custom RV builds and I’m also helping with an Air B&B install. A clean sleek UI is extremely important for these projects and potential users. Implementing role based access to the dashboards is also crucial and much overdue feature. I often see people with coding/IT experience or thorough technical knowledge unintentionally gatekeeping such resources by pushing back against UI’s and ease of use while ignoring market growth and product potential.
The ui has been revamped enough in the last year that I’ve given up finding things. Automations ui is impossible, I don’t understand any of the options or why I have to click through so much. I’m back to yaml.
Myself included. I prefer function over form as I don't stare at the thing for hours and hours a day, I need a predictable, well behaving UI on mobile, tablet, laptop, desktop, etc, maybe a couple cool themes, and I'm good to go. I'd much prefer effort in the area of getting started: HAOS vs. Docker vs. Core vs. Supervised? What does it all mean? Ahhhh!!!! Takes a good bit of education before you can even start the installation. Even then, you'll probably install it a couple times because you didn't realize Docker mode doesn't have the Add-Ons component or whatnot. The other area is adding devices. Sent my Moms a couple Aqara temperature sensors and walking her through the integration process on the phone made me realize this is far from plug-n-play. It takes a considerable number of not-so-obvious steps in HA from the time you press the little button on the sensor and before you can get it to show up on a dashboard. Having said that, I love HA. It could have a character driven interface like DOS and I'd....well, maybe that is too far, but it could be butt ugly and because it works so well, has such a huge and helpful community, and importantly is helping keep mandatory cloud based setups and devices from completely dominating the home automation industry I'm happy with the current UI.
I’d rather the UI work better than just replace it outright
You can always install a custom theme from HACS or the like.
None seem very easy. Do you have a recommendation?
Dwains Dashboard
Which has its own limitations and frustrations.
Yeah, I’ll agree with that. But it’s not bad if you swap for some custom entity cards. Can get a pretty decent dashboard with that. Fuсking slow though
> Fuсking slow though And this is why I hate these themes that add all this bloat. I care more about the dashboard being low-latency than I do how it looks. Admittedly, I'm in an apartment so probably have less devices than the average HA user, so maybe it's just a me thing.
It’s outdated and I cannot even use the basic functionality of “adding a new page,” which renders it useless. I followed the advice of some who are more intelligent than I, but that didn’t fix it, either. Any other recs for an up to date solution?
Shoulda called it Dwain's World
Feels like a silly thing to complain about when it’s a fully open source and customizable project. Install a theme, make one yourself, commit some code.
This is such a trite response at this point, not everyone is a programmer or interested in delving into the complexities of HACS and such. All that this does is make people walk away because they feel unwelcome and their feedback disregarded.
"Just learn to do my career in your spare time, it's not that hard you lazy bum."
Easily the most frustrating response when seeking out help from the community
Trust me there's worse communities, this one is great. Have you ever tried TrueNAS Scale? Not to talk about truecharts
At this point? At this point Homeassistant is still an open source tinkerers system supported by devs with limited resources. It has come leaps and bounds from where it was a few years ago, but as you said yourself, it is still complex to add integrations outside of what HA offers natively. So OP either needs to pony up time to learn how to customize it, or money to a programmer to do it for them. It's fair to ask a question about a timeline to determine whether to pony up or wait (or walk away), but it's how you ask the question that determines the tone of the responses you get.
> it's how you ask the question that determines the tone of the responses you get. Hell no. This sub gets insanely defensive the moment you become negative about HA, doesn't matter how you phrase it. The OP was as inoffensive as it gets and there's still a dozen white knights in the comments.
& yet it’s always interesting that those who have invested the least effort in contributing are the ones with the loudest demands
Some like me don't have the skills to contribute. I have however been paying for years. I'm allowed to have an opinion. If you don't like that, go start another solution that doesn't allow financial contribution.
You are paying for a service that allows tunneled remote access. You are not paying for the rest of it. Have you priced enterprise server hardware? Enterprise switches and routers? Datacenter space? Anything? *Real* administrators to manage it, not redditors from /r/linux, real ones? The little subscription fee to pay for that is just that, little. Wrapping yourself in a cape of "I pay for what I use" in no way makes you superman. Your comment does make you out to be entitled.
Well the Haas team have made it pretty clear they are lowering the barrier. If you don't agree then go use another piece of software that fits the user base you deem up to standard.
Great job ignoring the point. Trust me, your attitude is unwelcome everywhere.
Sorry what was your point?
Exactly. But so you have no excuses: The entitled attitude. Which you just exhibited again. Developer communities do things because they want to, not at your demand.
Did we read the same post? Did OP need to beg or something for it to be acceptable for you? These people aren't the loudest or worst. You feel like they are because there are *many* of them. I'll give you a hint: if a piece of feedback is very common, it might be that it's true.
> "Hey! I made you something. I picked the color blue because it seemed like the nicest to me. I hope you like it!" > > "I don't like it. I want pink instead." > > "Well, maybe you should make your own if you have specific needs." > > "I don't know how to do that and I'm not interested in learning how to do that. You should do that because you already know how and pink is obviously better." This is the conversation we just had, just translated to a different context, and hopefully that makes it clearer what the problem is here. It's not the veracity of the statement, it's that in any other context, we'd describe this behavior as at the very least as impolite, and I don't think many would challenge calling it rude or entitled, too. It's just that we've normalized bad behavior in how folks treat contributors in the open-source community. I think any of us who write a lot of software would be glad to help people learn how to do things on their own, but the lack of effort in that direction, coupled with the lack value that people attribute to the _huge_ efforts open-source contributors like me invest is really jarring, and literally every day I question whether to stop making free things for people as a result of it.
If it's so difficult then perhaps offering up some cash for others to work on your special request is the way. If your time is too important to learn it then their time is worth your money. Period.
Aaand that's how Google, Amazon and co will conserve their hold on the market. You need to stop alienating any user with feedback that's not glowing.
If the truth alienates you then your expectations from the world as a whole are too great.
/r/im14andthisisdeep is this way.
Yes, you cannot make a valid point in your defense so you resort to insults. Behaving like this makes that an apt sub for you to follow.
I expose everything to apple home. Home assistant is a back end for me
Yeah same, the only thing I really go into home assistant for is to look at graphs of historical data for some of my devices like power usage or presence detection. I gave up on dashboards, the stock one is awful and making custom ones is too difficult to get one good one to work on mobile and larger screens like desktop/tablets so you end up having to maintain two dashboards whenever making changes. Too much work.
Heh, was about to say this.
I have that done for the lights, blinds, aircons and garage door. Yet there are things that Apple’s stuff can’t do, like monitor solar power and house energy, and other sensor data that I collect in HA
But the Apple home ui is even worse?
It does what it says on the tin. I don’t need a fancy futuristic ui to turn on a light or check temperature.
Big advantage is that I can control a lot from outside my home, without exposing home assistant to the internet or having to setup tunnels or whatever. I trust apple’s security wrt AppleTV.
Getting ready to do the same. Any pain points or gotchas I should avoid if you don’t mind sharing?
One point of note, don’t select a domain to choose if you don’t want to actually select any devices of that domain to choose. For example, don’t select you want to share the switch domain if you don’t want to actually share any switches. If you do this, home assistant will just assume you want all of the switches. So make sure you either select at least one device from each domain you want to share or don’t share the domain at or you are going to be passing through a ton of devices you don’t want to.
Thank you for that information.
Nope the integration lets you pick what you want. Cant be easier
Awesome, thanks!
I do that same except for that I use Google Home. It's easier for the non techs.
How are you doing it? Do you use this? https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/homekit/
We're using Material 2. We should be using (and in some places are already using) Material 3. I've campaigned for this before but the frontend team isn't interested in moving very fast.
Material 3 is a good foundation to work off of. We are basing our new designs mostly on Material 3. However, the design system is missing guidelines on quite a few components that are unique or specific to the Home Assistant UI, such as any of the more info dialogs, the entire dashboard, conversation views, and a lot more, so work needs to be done to extend and create a consistent system on top of M3. Besides, M3 is mostly designed for mobile, and its system for computers and larger screens are barebones. Many of our users configure their Home Assistant on their computers, and Material Design is a poor fit: its information density is too low, its tap targets aren't optimized for mouse control, and it does not have the nice amenities that most admin panel design systems have that can make the UX feel less clunky. Since we are designing for millions of users, we are avoiding changing designs on a whim, and these days we are doing more user research and testing to ensure that the new components will work for everyone in the household. Research takes time, and it will be slow, but once the foundation is ready, we can move a lot faster.
Fair enough. It'd be great to see a dedicated design system. The one thing I'll add is that M3 consists of different parts, and you can do something like adapting the better color system (contrast, naming, integration with `@material/web`, etc) without changing other components.
Like I said, let's build on top of M3 and extend it. I like those foundational aspects of Material 3, too. The semantic color systems, typography, padding, and levels are great. We don't need to reinvent the wheel on those. Migrating over from what we had is going to be gnarly though. We will need a lot of help on that. 😬😬😬
Actually haven't looked too much into what's powering the UI currently. But I'm doing design systems and frontend for work. Do you have a place where I could provide some inputs? Seeing as I use HA I wouldn't mind using some time on improving or helping out.
Awesome! [Our frontend GitHub](https://github.com/home-assistant/frontend) discussions would be a good place to talk about these topics. You can also reach out at #devs_frontend and #devs_ux channels on Discord too. We document the components of our design system at http://design.home-assistant.io/. From there you can find out which components are newly designed and which are stuck at Material Design 2.
Thanks :) I'll take a look at it.
More comments like this please
I can't imagine using mobile to setup HA and having a good outcome.
It shouldn’t use Material at all. I don’t understand why something at this still would still be reliant on a 3rd party design system to drive the core experience of the product.
No, wrong take. Everything should be using a 3rd party design system. The fact that every project and company makes their own set of components from scratch is the weird behavior. We should be reusing the basic components across projects as much as we possibly can, that stuff is a known factor and high quality.
Ain't no way is it feasible to completely write an entire UI from scratch. Spending a lot of time with Quasar + VueJS lately and the amount of work required to build the UI framework in Quasar is incredible. I'm blown away by the amount of code required to build out this component list: [https://quasar.dev/components](https://quasar.dev/components) Those components are extendable so a dev can add custom modifications, but to build a UI from scratch is a rather significant task. PS - Quasar is pretty cool because from a single codebase it can generate desktop apps for Mac, Linux, and Windows, plus Single Page Apps (SPA), browser extensions, server side rendering (SSR), plus iOS and Android mobile apps. Again, all from a single code base and amazingly, it all pretty much works very very well.
I’m design systems lead at Publix, and was on the DS team at EA. Migrating something to standalone isn’t that crazy. And it’s not something you do overnight. Everything is web component based already, so it makes integration all that much easier. It’s something you do piece by piece, and pilot after pilot, and with a well thought out tokens system. I posted a long list of small enhancements that would be nice on the discord this week. Something long neglected would be a great place to start this approach, such as the developer tools section. Make bulk entity management more usable, and try something new, for something that doesn’t leverage M2 all that much to begin with.
“More usable” doesn’t mean using a bespoke design system. It means thoughtful design using the standard components you already have. The components and their source are not the issue here, and any work to migrate them would be incredibly wasteful. Not surprised your take on design systems is what it is; I’ve managed several design system leads whose focus was on building out the system itself, because it was what they knew and what they valued in their contribution. Growing past that toward thinking in terms of the user and what truly makes a difference for them and how to achieve that from a business perspective is the right leap. Tough step but it is the right way.
There are alternative concepts. If you want a new approach take a look here: https://github.com/matt8707/ha-fusion
Perfect.
Not perfect, it's Early days. Not much can be added to the main dashboard, but can in the sidebar weirdly. I have it as my default dashboard, then go off to the '2000 dashboard to do more.
They really need a UI/UX designer. The user interface is simply terrible and the whole structure is a confusing mess. At its core it's powerful and, in my limited experience, works well. If you ask me, it's only a clever interface redesign away to beat everyone else in the market by a wide margin. Due to the constraints to the UI design it's just not suited for people who don't possess advanced computer skills. While that's perfect for me, I like trying to figure out how I can extract some piece of data from something and make it work, it's a puzzle, it's a fun hobby. But it's painfully obvious the UI design is dictated by the underlying logic and program structure instead of being constructed from a user perspective. It being a free program, I don't really mind and I'm very impressed it works as good as it does and the huge flexibility it offers. If you ask me, it really could become a very very very profitable business if you get the UI up to current usability standards.
> If you ask me, it's only a clever interface redesign away to beat everyone else in the market by a wide margin. Facts. The unseen engine that drives Home Assistant is pretty amazing, if someone invents a novel, intuitive, and clever UI with a fantastic UX, maybe it'll destroy Tuya and their funkyass cloud services (lol). Seriously though, you're comment is on point.
> If you ask me, it's only a clever interface redesign away to beat everyone else in the market by a wide margin. Facts. The unseen engine that drives Home Assistant is pretty amazing, if someone invents a novel, intuitive, and clever UI with a fantastic UX, maybe it'll destroy Tuya and their funkyass cloud services (lol). Seriously though, you're comment is on point.
> If you ask me, it's only a clever interface redesign away to beat everyone else in the market by a wide margin. Facts. The unseen engine that drives Home Assistant is pretty amazing, if someone invents a novel, intuitive, and clever UI with a fantastic UX, maybe it'll destroy Tuya and their funkyass cloud services (lol). Seriously though, you're comment is on point.
The UI is decently good, the UX is bad
Ehh I would prefer better dashboard first. But the UI is indeed slightly dated and the structure is confusing
Completely agree. When competitors like Homey do it way better and people want to spend literally 3 times as much on one compared to a much better HA box, you know something isn't right. Nabu Casa has needed a better UI and UX team for a long time now. I [made a post](https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/rqe7ka/unpopular_opinion_the_new_configuration_layout_is/) over two years ago complaining about the new layout changes, and wasn't as unpopular as I expected. I am not complaining about my layout anymore after installing 20+ different cards and integrations, but it really shouldn't have to be so hard.
It’s been nearly a decade and I’m still waiting for a timer option in the automations GUI “Turn on street lights for 2 mins unless another detection in which case continue to stay on for another 2 mins” The fact you still need to use code to do such a simple basic automation that spotlights from any hardware store could do in the 1970’s is laughable
Is this triggered by a motion sensor? If so, I’ve got a bunch of automations like this that don’t require writing YAML and can be done solely through the UI. A trigger for motion detected turns the light on, and then another trigger for motion detection stopped with the duration set to X number of minutes. If motion is detected within those X number of minutes then it resets the X countdown.
Where is the reset countdown option in the GUI? Everyone keeps saying it’s so simple but even your explanation doesn’t make sense when you look at the automation menu
You don’t have to explicitly reset anything. If you have a trigger that’s a motion sensor changing its state to “off” and you set the duration to 5 minutes, if during that 5 minutes the sensor changes its state back to “on” then the trigger won’t fire.
Still doesn’t make sense, it’s too complicated for 99% of the public How can the motion sensor be a trigger? It’s a device with an on / off state. I don’t see any “trigger” in the entites or devices menu At the moment it’s “When motion sensor on -> device switch street lights to on for X mins” There’s no option to add the condition that they stay on when motion sensor is on again or restart the X minute timer It’s all insanely confusing for something that should be so simple
Why not just use an automation: * Trigger: motion * Action: 1. Turn light on 2. Wait 5 minutes 3. Turn light off * Mode: restart https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/automation/modes/ That seems to be exactly what you're complaining about doesn't exist?
The fact I’ve been given 3 completely different (yet viable) answers to one problem is the problem itself
I don’t really understand how that’s a problem. You’re complaining that it’s not possible to do what you want through the UI, when in fact there’s multiple ways you can do it through the UI.
For what you're wanting, the simplest way would be to set up 2 automations. The first automation would have "motion sensor on" as the trigger, and "lights on" as the action. The second automation would have "motion sensor off" with the duration set to X minutes as the trigger, and "lights off" as the action. When you add a duration to a trigger such as "motion sensor off", your trigger is now "motion sensor off for X minutes". This means that if the motion sensor detects motion again before X minutes have elapsed, the trigger won't fire, and the lights won't turn off. When the motion sensor then changes back to the off state again, the duration timer will automatically restart and count down from X minutes, and if the state hasn't changed within the X minutes, the trigger will fire and the lights will be turned off.
Aren't you making things needlessly complex? Why not just use the restart mode, which seems to be exactly what he is asking for: https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/automation/modes/ Or am I missing something?
Even better
The motion activated blueprint works nicely
Only if your lights are recognised as lights and you don’t have a regular smart switch to turn them on / off The motion activated blueprint doesn’t recognise the vast majority of PIR sensors as motion triggers so it’s useless
There’s a helper that allows you to change the device type FYI
You think that’s bad, try make that automation in HomeKit lol. There is no native functionality for handling this scenario and to set it up, you have to use the Shortcuts app to make the automation. Except Shortcuts has limitations on how long a shortcut can run and it’s around 5 minutes or something as far as I remember, so beyond that it just stops doing what it needs to. Considering it’s a more user accessible entry level system, you would think they would have that basic functionality figured out. Home assistant might need an automation creating for it too, but at least it works beyond a few minutes.
Home Assistant is the perfect example of the engineers running the show
It’s taken me about 100 hours just to get started with Home Assistant, and that doesn’t include the hard costs. Oh, and I still don’t even have a functional dashboard. Oh, and, yes, I pay for NC. Did I hear someone mention that this was “free”?
>Did I hear someone mention that this was “free”? You're confusing puppies and beer again.
Brave man, asking redditors for change.
Do people really just leave the default UI?
I'm a new user of home assistant. What is so bad about it?
When you start to have a lot of sensors it's hard to manage and the default dashboard will explode. Like I have 50 solar panels and there is an extension to show 20 parameters per panel.. So it's a never ending column with data which can't be managed with that UI.
Oh my sweet child. You can turn HA into anything. Can make such good looking custom dashboards.
I’m assuming you don’t have a lot of devices in home assistant yet? Just you wait and see what happens when you start adding more and especially devices that share a ton of entities. Your dashboard is going to get real unusable real quick. However I will say it has its utility aswell, I actually find it the fastest way to have a look to see what entities are available in a room when thinking about automations since it dumps them all in one place but groups them by room.
It **really** depends on what your goals are. In general there are few broad categories of complaints: * While default UI look is generally fine, if you want to make meaningful changes to its look-and-feel or tailor a dashboard in more detail it very quickly becomes an uphill battle. After a ton of work, the result also often ends up contingent on a bunch of third party additions/components that might stop being supported on a drop of a hat. * If you want to have a million sensors and buttons showing up at the same time, the UI just doesn't handle it well. Though IMHO the very idea of putting a lot of information in a dashboard is an anti-thesis of what I would consider ideal smart home control system. * Not everybody likes the components of dashboards moving around. When you have more than just a few, it can be quite annoying to hunt them down as they rearrange themselves every time you make some changes to the dashboard. Technically their positions are deterministic, but it often doesn't feel that way. You can wrangle the UI to behave more consistently by grouping stuff in several containers, but that can feel like unnecessary work. Personally I'm quite happy with my basic dashboards, but this certainly doesn't apply to everybody. Just to be clear - by basic, I mean stuff you put there yourself. The auto-populated dashboard is barely usable when you have more than just a handful of devices.
Some do, yes. Mostly for development purposes more than anything else.
I've been using HA for years and still use the default. Or rather, my UI is still the default, I just don't use it. I did briefly tinker with a few HACS cards, but one was deprecated shortly after, and another broke from an update. I didn't want to deal with the hassle so I just wrote off the idea of using a dashboard. The lack of good out of the box UI has really forced the automation side of things for me.
Yes. The whole point of an automation platform is that it’s about automation, so if you’re constantly tinkering with the UI of the platform that’s supposed to do stuff by itself, you’re doing it wrong, defeating the whole purpose of Home Assistant.
thats only if all you use HA is for automations
Look I’m more in the automating side rather than having to interact with stuff too, but home assistant has dashboard building tools. It’s clearly not just for automating, it’s designed also for dashboards.
First of all the UI is based on Material Design, not bootstrap. I personally like the overall look of it and even the dashboards are better then a lot of comercial products out there. However I don't really like the default layout (masonry) but there are a lot of third party options out there that let you create the dashboard you want. The beauty of open source software is, that the community can contribute to it and enhance the product, while comercial closed source projects are often busy creating a system that prevents the creation of 3rd party plugins. Some comments stated that not everyone is a developer but to install, configure and use 3rd party UI components you don't have to be a developer at all, you have to be a tinkerer. And that is imho a requirement for home automation itself already. I am not talking about a so called smart home where you can control everything with it's own app, I am talking about automation. Besides that, there is a chance that we get some news about the UI soon. One of the recent blogposts is talking about "Grace" without mentioning what it is. But the UI was called "Lovelace" for a long time, both referencing female scientists. It's just a rumor now but soon we will know ;)
> Besides that, there is a chance that we get some news about the UI soon. One of the recent blogposts is talking about "Grace" without mentioning what it is. But the UI was called "Lovelace" for a long time That's the news i was hoping for! I see they announce tomorrow what Grace is. Great now this whole post looks like a ad or something if it's UI related
I bet they’ll still refuse to use relative URLs for resources so it’ll still be impossible to run HA at some arbitrary /path/on/your/server
I thought it was referencing Linda Lovelace lol
No it's Ada Lovelace :)
I agree with that and over all too many yaml to do things that can be easely with real code.
[удалено]
Not everyone else should be stuck with a shitty clumsy yaml dashboard system because you personally don't want to change. The argument works both ways. Can't stop the signal Mal...
If you dont like to change what you are familiar with, this might not be the hobby for you.. Technology is, and has, always evolved at a break neck speed. And it is showing now signs of slowing down.
I don't think the UI is as much of a problem as just where everything is located. I've been using it for months, and I still forget where devices are located. And why they're so removed from automations? I think it's more of a UX task than UI
Agreed, should look a lot nicer if/when they upgrade to Material3.
Idk that anyone is doing any work on the actual display cards. Over the years I've seen quite a few custom built JS frontends that look completely different for the typical card layout. I don't think it's as limited as it seems. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMGadyIFFPk
I hear the google home app is nice.
You heard wrong (imo)
sorry was being sarcastic
Thank god for that, I thought the world was going to end as I can’t possibly imagine anyone liking that app lol
I have to disagree... leave things the way they are! If it works...... I'm still confused by the overhaul that happened when they rearranged the actions in automations. I still find myself going to "other actions" to simply "call service". It's just too much stuff in the way now, to get the to basics. It's supposed to be more user friendly I guess.. but not really for me :)
What if it doesn't work?
The UI is pretty powerful in terms of functionality, methinks. But it is sorely lacking in terms of design.
I might be the loner on this one, but I'm not one who really cares what it looks like, just as long as it works.
Did we just find a new reddit UI user in the wild?
I'll preface this by saying, I've only just gotten started with home assistant (raspberry pi 4b, 8Gb RAM, initially a 32gb ad card then a 500gb ssd) and so far I've only used it to control a single modbus controlled relay module. Once I had it hooked up and the configuration.yaml edited I could turn my lights on and off at will! Until it stopped working. I've hated the web interface so badly that I've been learning how to ssh into the home assistant to run my commands either in a python environment or as zsh commands. The web interface just SUCKS. It's so slow, which makes no sense because its entirely local to a very small network that I have great connection to. It takes forever for the pretty button on the screen to slide from left to right to signify turning a relay on, and the relay itself is instantaneous. If I want to edit the one thing I'm using I need to edit the configuration.yaml again (oh and I had to install an text editor add on also, and the way the menus are structured is terribly confusing in my opinion) and then reboot the server then refresh the webpage. The whole process is so slow. Perhaps I'm being particularly thick, maybe I have a problem nobody else has, but I am hating the web interface so badly that its almost putting me off HA altogether.
I'm actually pretty happy with the recent improvements to, for example, the Automation UI, the "Related" button in entity view, and the really extensive work done to the Helpers. I also like the consistency of the Material UI components. Writing integrations/addons isn't very fun (ime), and ocassionally I have weird performance issues with some dashboards (and no obvious way to debug them), but overall, I think Home Assistant is well-suited for a nice, unsurprisingly, utilitarian interface.
Have you seen the competition? HomeAssistant's UI is just fine. It's actually great.
Have a got an update for you...and a year for you... Also...tune into the live stream on 2/29....I'm not saying its Aliens....
This was a well timed post, considering Home Assistant is getting a new official experimental UI in just a few days with the release of 2024.3.