Call to action - volunteers for openHAB "marketing"

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121

im not a developer and not from marketing, im only a user and read the 2 threads interested.
i hope you pardon a comment from me what could be improved for make it more attractive for users:

  • update/upgrade: im using docker and it is mostly smooth to update. But not every time. From my point of view it would be good if all what you have works after an update without much manual intervention. If something happens or to do show it to users in an understandable way (on gui) without searching openhab.log and long java errors. the most important thing is beware functionality
  • usability count of clicks for an action you want to do: i make you an example - you want to install a binding. you click on properties. then you can click sometimes more, more, more and select what to install. or you can go to search and fill in some chars. Why not on first page “bindings” is also the search form for filtering the bindings?
  • i like the idea of short video clips with examples that the user can do step by step to get device x running. Most devices i got without something like that to run, but for non technical users it would be a less higher step to get “success”. “Success” is the base for what we are calling in german “Mundpropaganda” that means an “insider” tells to another interested people which smarthome-sw to install
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:slight_smile: I just meant the “design” for the homepage to attract potential users in the targeted segment.
Although, don’t expect that the user guide with screenshots will just be 5 pages :wink:

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I agree 100% with all of what you have written. And there are situations which indeed is not acceptable at all. In my opinion, they are few.

Often when I read a thread from someone which clearly express “new-users”, I expect anything in his thread, wether it beeing directly demands or suggestions, I simply read it as suggestions. Since its a new-user (or not experienced) I dont start of by blaming him not knowing how things are beeing communicated. (ofcouse there are human limits). I dont tell him to read the documents, unless I also tells him exactly where to find it. Cause I know it can be a struggle to even find stuff in the docs. Even though he may have look the obvious places, there is still some lacking in there,

Example - The other day I looked in the doc for the direct link to a single page in the build in UI. I never found it in the docs. Insted I found it in the community.
(Im still dealing with trying to understand the main UI, since I moved from openHAB2 til openHAB4 lately).

It kinda gave me yet another frustrated situation. But I´d managed it because I knew better. A new-user/not knowlegded user probably wouldnt. And chances of beeing even more frustrated will become much worse, if someone dont supply a more direct kind of help, making sure he´ll get the succees he is searching for. Its the small successes which makes things growing, specially in a evenviroment as complexed as openHAB.

That is why I mostly focus on specific basic stuff and the use of the word “easy” , when debating openHAB for new users.
Things has to be easy, wether its the actuall setup procedure or dealing with issues during the first time setup, which may result in the need of help from someone/community. And sometime the knowleged user/maintainers/developers has to accept, the frustrations which once in a while may be appear in the community. And also try to remember. Its a written media. Sometimes its hard to write what it really meant. Again there are limits ofcuse.

Demanding is out of the question… No reason to spend any time on demands.

Suggestions however, it is kinda problem sometimes due to a procedure which can be rather dull.

  1. Is a suggestion for a change a good one or not?
    The person suggesting most probably thinks its a good one. There are no guarantee, anyone else thinks the same. So often a suggestion needs to be debated and sometime even argued in threads. I have tried that myself a coupple of times. And it didnt went well in specific one situation.
    After debating, there is a need of an PR. But what is a PR to a new user making a suggestion, other than yet another system to register, and start all over with the debate?
  2. Even though lots of people/users may think its a good suggestion. There is still no guarantee, that it will be accepted by those who may be capable of making it happen (developers/maintainers). They need to feel the same. If not, the user is on his own and is beeing met with (do it yourself).
  3. If a user manage to convince developers/maintainers, there is still one huge step missing as you say… Who is going to make it happen.

It can be overwelming for a user, and even a experinced user.
As mentioned I tried it a coupple of time. Once (openHAB2) I had a suggestion for a build-in backup/restore (using cli-backup) directly from the mainUI. That didnt went well :wink:

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That’s something that has been recently added I think. Adding it to the docs probably fell through the cracks.

But is that something that is “basic and easy”? Where is that line drawn? In my experience, “basic and easy” means “exactly what I want to do” for most new users. I’m constantly seeing comments along the lines of “I want to do X. I can’t believe that everyone doesn’t need to do X too. Why is this so hard?” Often X is doing something involving complicated timing, detecting ordering of events, and stuff like that.

I don’t know if you are aware that an attempt was made to implement that. I don’t know if it was in response to your suggestion or was generated from elsewhere. Unfortunately it hit intractable technical difficulties and never could be fully implemented.

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That can happen, ofcouse.

I know, and I agree. Lots of things are highly individual for each person. Therefore its very complicated trying to please all.
Thats the reason why I think openHAB should somehow define whats basic in a way which is understandable for most.

I cant say for sure if linking direct to a page in the UI is easy or suppose to be basic. In my opinion, its basic, and therefore should be easy to find, because its a simple url adress, which most not knowlegeded user should be able to handle. (otherweise I´ll question how they managed to enter openHAB at all :slight_smile: ).
But I agree, its hard to define. And impossible to please the masses.

No. I have unfortunatly been off from openHAB a coupple of years now due to moving to a brand new house and trying to build some “smart home” again. Only been on a few times, when I migrated my old system OH2.5 to OH 3, and latest to OH4.

Its like starting all over with all the new changes in 3 and 4. Most of which I like. But I still prefere my textfiles for things, items, sitemaps etc. I tried the UI setup, but I cant deal with it in a pleasent manner. (Im probably getting too old).

Latest I struggle with understanding the build-in UI, widgets etc, which is why I discovered the lack in the doc, for det direct link to a page. And then get my damn tablet to turn on the screen showing the UI page by the use of build-in camera. But either Fully Kiosk (Android app) doesnt work correctly or my tablet is a piece of chinese crap. I think its a combination of both :sweat_smile:

Its sad to read they didnt manage to get a backup procedure working. But good to hear they atleast tried! Hopefully there will be a solution, as I still believe this is a highly important feature. Even though Im using textbased files :wink:

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It should be noted that there is a backup of each JSONDB file made on every change. By default up to 5 backups are kept but you can change that through Settings → Json Storage. For those minor “oh no! I didn’t mean to delete that!” OH has you covered. The PR that was attempted was to do the equivalent of openhab-cli backup and return the zip file through the browser.

If you don’t use the tools built into the UI it is indeed pretty miserable. But if you discover your Things (where possible), use “add equipment” to create the Items, and take advantage of all the tools built into the Developer Sidebar (alt-shift-d) it’s actually pretty awesome. At least I think so, YMMV. I can get far more done, faster (no syntax errors), with less needing to look at the docs (the descriptions of the forms are pretty good) that I ever was with file based configs. Being able to pin everything I’m working in the sidebar is a game changer for me. I rarely need to leave the tab, let alone the browser.

@Oliver2, I don’t know if this needs to be added to the list above or not, but my recommendation is that one of the goals of this new simplified getting started tutorial(s) needs to include “how to use the docs”. Not necessarily as a separate section, but scattered throughout.

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Hey Rich, good idea.
My plan was to have a section “What next?” at the end of the guide so that they realize other features of OH such as persistency, blockly, scripting, personal widgets, etc which is more a collection of links to the existing docs with some explanations. In this section a “how to” for the docs fits perfectly.
If you provide me with some details you have in mind that’ll be great. I added this to the actions post number 2

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I probably won’t know how best to work it in without seeing the flow of the new tutorial.

I don’t think a stand alone page is going to work very well. We kind of already have that and it’s largely ignored and/or hard for the readers to apply in practice.

My thought would be to constantly hint or show where they can find more information. For example, when you first bring up a concept, like Items or Things or the like, somewhere have “for more information see page X, Y, and Z”.

What I tried to do in the advanced rules page in Getting Started was to constantly repeat the pattern: “Now I want to do X. I look to the docs for JS Scripting for X and I found instructions that tell me how to do it.”

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For sure that will be added wherever possible.

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Hmm, but the json file is not available from the mainUI to download/backup, or? (or just a copy/paste of the database from the mainUI).

I tried that at first, but I found it ackward and confusing. Probably because Im so damn used to textfiles setup.
I think part of the reason beeing, that the syntaxs not always are name the same as descriped in doc, and therefore its just easier to do what I´ve always been doing, not spending time trying to understand…
Second, most of my devices was already made by the use of textfiles from the old 2.5 setup. Which meant only a few changes to the textfiles was needed. From there is was simply drag&drop each file.

I know these excuses are mainly due to its lazyness. But I´m human like eveybody else (I think). :slight_smile:

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No but there are several REST API endpoints that will dump the contents of various JSONDB files. For example, if you hit the end point to get all the Things, you’ll basically get the Things file.

This statement confuses me because using the procedure I described means you don’t need to know the syntax at all. Everything is laid out for you and you cannot make a syntax error when creating Items and Things. Obviously you can still create syntax errors in a script. But you’ll never create a rule that is simply syntactically invalid because you misspelled then (for example).

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No I meant, its when configuring a thing. These settings can sometimes be confusing, rather than just copying/pasting from a previous thing in a textfile.

Some goes for items…
When knowing how to deal with the syntacs in textfiles, its easy just to copy/paste :slight_smile:

133

You can copy and paste from the Code tab.

134

Hi Rich,
I am 80% done with the Quick Guide and want to do some formatting now. How can I add a table of content (toc) to my md file and change the order in the main menu tree of /docs/ on the left hand side?

135

Unfortunately after that you still can control nothing in your home.

136

Yes, sure, but this is the point to start with, if you have bought other smart home solutions. So it’s really as easy as it can be to get started.
Compare it to HA, that’s so easy, they created a dedicated hardware and sell it preconfigured…

Afterwards, it’s all up to your external hardware.

TLDR: with some hardware it won’t get easier on any other solution.

Full text:
I have knx in my house and I have had some stuff to “smart control” it, like LEIBnix (really simple super cheap hardware, especially built for knx by an enthusiast early in the '00es) MisterHouse (uhh…) and even “pro” solutions (HomeServer from Gira).
And in 2012 I found openHAB (just the week as it went to v1.0).
I set it up on my Windows machine (Oracle Java 6 was already installed), downloaded runtime.zip, demo.zip and addons.zip. unpacked runtime.zip, unpacked demo.zip and moved it to conf-folder (as said in the short online doc), launched start.bat and had an up and running openHAB demo server.
I then read the (really short) doc about knx, copied the knx-addon to the addons folder (wow, instant loading, don’t have to restart openHAB at all), went to the demo.items file and created a Switch Item for a light in my room, finally went to the demo.sitemap file and added a line for my new Item, boom, had my first REAL light in less than ten minutes from first download (really!).
It was fantastic in comparison to all other “solutions” I formerly worked with.

I’m fully aware that I’m not in the category of new users (and I wasn’t in 2012 as well). But it was by far the smoothest solution I tried out at this time.
Later I did some tests with edomi (another very speciallized knx solution, much like HomeServer), HA and ioBroker, but these came later and it was a mess compared to openHAB (at the time I took a look at it).

openHAB got an UI with openHAB2 and I nearly skipped openHAB2 at all, I needed more than two years to get my smart home working flawless with openHAB2 (but I had it working with openHAB1, so no need to hurry…) and when I finally switched, it was shortly before openHAB3 was showing up, so instead of getting some peace, I had to struggle again, because of some “better and easier way to configure the system”.

To be fair, there is a ton of stuff which was added since 1.0 (not only bindings, but other really helpful stuff like UoM, profiles, tags) and so the setup with text files got more complex, too. But I still like text files much more than using the UI, it’s simple, it’s clear, it’s readable, I can use my favorite text editor, I can control it via ssh.

I have added many other hardware since, and as I’m used to the concept of openHAB, I find it very convenient.
For sure this is very biased :slight_smile: and I’m completely aware of it.
But as said earlier, smart home is not and will not be easy, at least if you’re not keeping all your stuff exclusively from one brand (or at least in one bus system).
openHAB is a bus system itself, and it has lots of connectivity and gateways to literally hundreds of inter-incompatible bus systems, which will never work together without the openHAB/HA/ioBroker glue.

Can it be made easier? Sure. Will someone get all up and running without any effort? Never.
And this is true for all solutions, even proprietary systems with cloud only (the dumbest way to build a smart home, as it will immediately stop working without internet).

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Agree, but I´m not used to use the code option, yet.

138

I dont agree…

A Smart home comes in many variants these day.
For strictly new users, they will most likely start off with an app-based smarthome. Like Homematic, Homey, Philips Hue etc. Thats a simple app which needs installation from app-store (google or apple).

Remeber, most of them are used to apps, and not to fiddle with somekind of motherboard (Rpi), SD card writing etc.

So its a huge mistake thinking, its the same.

Indeed, this is where the real fun begin. And this is where the first succes should become available from the hassle of dealing with an Rpi (motherboard-thing, and SD card writing).
This is the stage where its very important to show the user how to discover things/devices, and show somekind of result in a basic grafic userinterface. If openHAB has discovered a light. This is where it shows how to turn on/off that light.
No more fiddling, just hit the discover button and show result. Cause this is what whould have happened, if they were installing a smarthome like the above mentioned from an app.

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139

But this is not smart home, but remote control. :slight_smile:

This is available for some hardware - but at least you have to command openHAB to use some specific hardware, as the list of bindings is quite long and it would take ages to start every binding, scan and deactivate, even if only doing it with the autodiscovery bindings.

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140

You and I agree on that. But those using it, they believe its smarthome :slight_smile:

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