Ideas and Discussion: What Features Do You Want in openHAB 5.0?

I think there’s a more general “problem” with MainUI that hampers adoption. I myself have used OH since OH2, I’m not sure exactly when I started, but I’ve been using it for 6-8 years or so. I still use a combination of Sitemap and HABPanel for my “daily use” (a combination because both have their shortcomings).

Since OH3 I’ve had numerous attempts at “migrating” to MainUI, but each one has stalled. I’m at it again now, and maybe I’ll succeed this time, but: I’m both quite technically inclined and stubborn and persistent. When I get overwhelmed and give up, I suspect that the majority has already given up a long time ago. And, that’s the point I want to make: It’s just too difficult to figure out how to do a lot of things. It’s often not very intuitive, and even the smallest things can require hours of reading forum threads.

Don’t take this the wrong way, I see that there are many good things in MainUI, the structure shows a lot of ambition - but the downside that users must often understand quite a lot of the concepts and structure just to do simple things.

I don’t really have a “fix” for this, but I do think it’s an important issue. Better documentation is an obvious suggestion, but there’s actually quite a lot of relatively good documentation already. The problem is to find the part you need at that time without a huge effort. I think that maybe this could be made somewhat easier by organizing the documentation in a more “hierarchical” way - so that you could read through topics faster to get the overview, and then “drill down” on the parts that really interest you right then. It might not be easy to actually achieve, I don’t have a good suggestion as to how exactly the documentation should be organized to work that way, but I believe that if it was achieved, it would make it easier for people to find the information they need. I often find that the documentation “hides” the bits I “need” at that time at some place that I would never have guessed, and the only way to find it is to read through a lot of stuff that don’t interest me right then. I also don’t think the documentation goes “deep enough” in many instances.

There’s already some “context-sensitive” help available in MainUI using the question mark in the upper right corner, which opens the developer sidebar. Extending such “interactive documentation” might also make it easier to understand how things tie together. That said, I’ve never noticed that “interactive documentation” until now… Personally, I really appreciate tooltips and “similar mechanisms” that focus on the exact thing you need to figure out right there and then.

I also think that a more intuitive design would be helpful in some places. If users understand something without reading the documentation, that’s always better than having the world’s best documentation.

It might be hard for many of you guys to see how this looks “from the outside”, because you already know the things people struggle to figure out. I often feel that the bits of information I need to gather to do something is spread all over the place, and that it can require some significant effort to find what I need. It might be something to think about that I find it much easier to figure out how to write a binding than to get MainUI to “behave”. In the end, if you can’t get things to work like you need them to within some reasonable amount of time, it probably won’t be used - meaning that some other solution will be used instead - whether that is another UI with OH or some other system altogether.

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