I’ve had my Vera Secure for almost a year now. I’ve come to two major conclusion and I wonder if my experiences resonates with others in the community. Would also be nice if Vera reps take some of this feedback to heart and in one way or another act on it. Especially if others chime in with similar experiences…
So, my conclusions:
- The UX could be WAY better.
- The newbie experience is horrendous
I’m kind of hoping the UX will improve with UI8, but no one is talking about it anymore which has me worried. There were 2 or 3 UI8 screenshots and a lot of commments for a while. Then nothing 
The horrible newbie experience can pretty much be summed up as “hours of research and testing for the simplest of things”. There are some pretty sweet posts in here explaining stuff (big thank you to everyone!), but I need to find them to read them! To make things more confusing, there is a lot of old/obsolete stuff floating around.
A real life example to illustrate my 2 points. When I addes my first wall plug (Fibaro Wall Plug - type F) I knew it was not supported other than as a “generic zwave device” but had seen posts confirming that it works with Vera. So I add it…
…and it shows up as two devices. A “lightbulb” and a “energy meter”. Energy meter does not seem to work. Searching forums other users have same problem. I can live with that, the “switch” is what I need so ignore this for now.
However, the wall plug is not for lights and the lightbulb icon is confusing both me and family members. So I search the forums. Find a post about changing the wall plug switch into a refrigerator… huh? Read some more… There is something called category and subcategory under advanced setting… apparently “refrigerator” is a subcategory to the “switch” category… I guess there are more subcategories to chose from…
…ok, I go into Advanced settings for my wall plug device and I find the Category and Subcategory fields. Awesome! But wait… those are text fields… with numbers… GAAH! Back to forums for a search… which takes me to the Wiki (There is a wiki too!? Oh god…) and a table listing all(?) categories and subcategories. Which as far as I can tell have fixed meanings, so basically hard coded.
So why does the UI not give me dropdown menues to select Category and Subcategory? With the actual names used instead of numbers?
Also, why is there no sticky post on the forums linking to intro posts or wiki pages so that people can get up to speed real quick with stuff like this? Changing the subcategory of a switch has to be be a fairly common scenario, right?
So, I finally have my wall plug showing as a wall plug (icon). Lets see what I can do about that “broken” energy meter. Back to search the forums… Someone mentions setting “parameter 15” to 1. Which brings me to one of the most annoying things in the Vera UX…
I’ve learned that adding/setting parameters is a powerful thing. But to add and set a “parameter”, you need to go into “Device options” rather than “Settings” or “Advanced”. Not the obvious choice… Next, you need to click the Add configuration settings button which allows you to add a… variable!? And there is a very clear and red warning text saying basically that I risk bricking my device by messing with variables!
The amount of time I had to spend searching and reading through forum posts to find out how do something so vital to device configuration as adding/setting a parameter is mindboggling… And to eventually discover that actually variable = parameter makes me want to scream!
Once again, why is there no sticky post on the forums linking to intro posts or wiki pages so that people can get up to speed real quick with stuff like this? Also, why on earth call it a variable when everyone else is calling it a parameter? At least add a text in the UI informing us that variable=parameter or something.
This was one example. I’ve gone through more or less the same motions for basically every device I’ve ever added! I’m slowly learning more and more stuff but the journey is a constant uphill battle and I fequently find myself thinking “Maybe there is something better I can switch to? Something that just works…”
Surely this experience can be improved upon?
