My impressions of the “new” UI so far…

[AncientGeek]

2023 User Interface

Now that I’ve accidentally updated to the new user interface, I’m reminded of the Version 2.6 fiasco back in 2018/2019 which resulted in Arlo being forced to report a material event to the SEC because V2.6 dedegraded the user experience so significantly.  I’ve been reviewing my communications from that time and find some are still relevant today.  However, below are my fresh comments for the new UI as it exists on the last day of 2023.

The dashboard initially seemed like a waste to me, but I now see a use for it.  I can add my most important cameras there from each location (I assume) which will save me scrolling through dozens of cameras to see a critical camera in each location while allowing me to organize the device screen by location.  I assume adding a device to the screen is called a “widget” because of some alarm functionality that I don’t use.  Otherwise calling adding a device to the dashboard seems oddly labeled a widget…while offering a screen named “devices” that shows screens full of “devices”, not widgets.  Also, the camera widgets here would be more useful if they offered the same functionality (including the currently missing settings icon) that we see on the “devices” screen.  Why strip out functionality here?  I don’t particularly care for the location of the “Emergency” function…smack in the middle of icons I’d use frequently and hopefully a function I’d use rarely.  I would expect “Emergency” to be off to one side.  Thankfully, selecting “Emergency“ doesn’t declare an emergency, it just brings us to another screen where we can take emergency action if desired.  Oddly the “…” icon in the upper right corner of the emergency screen results in displaying location settings...which one might think would be accessed more intuitively via a “gear” icon rather than “…” here.

The “Feed” screen is a huge waste of screen space on a tablet versus the previous Library view.  I have six or seven inches of solid gray bar (aka wasted space) between the meta data and the image for each recording.  This likely looks great in portrait mode on a smartphone, but it is a horrible waste of space on a tablet in landscape mode.  I do like the new calendar pop up for choosing days.  That feels like and improvement.  “Feed Settings” and “Manage Events” also seem good.

On the “Devices” screen, the device settings icon should be accessible from the devices display as it was in the previous version.  Eliminating settings here forces the user to go to other screens to find the settings icon.

Also on the devices screen, touching the three dots shifts us to a mode that allows us to edit the device order on the screen.  This is useful, but the wobbling icons here don’t work as well as they do on the iPadOS home screen due to the rectangular shape of the icons.   The wobble is just too severe and distracting.  It would be better to skip the wobble completely if it can’t be reduced significantly.  The current wobble is highly distracting and adds no real value to the intuitive function of this display mode.

Still on “Devices”: On an 11’ tablet (iPadOS) in landscape mode, when I touch a device tile, I get a full screen view of the device and I can touch the “play” arrowhead to go live.  However, there is no other navigation on that screen.  It looks like it might be a problem with the way the app handles the geometry of the 11’ iPad Pro.  I can’t close the device screen or go back to the previous screen nor get to settings.  However, if I rotate to portrait view, I can then see the top navigation line containing the back arrow, calendar icon and settings icon along with the bottom row of icons for mute, microphone, recording, snapshot and spotlight.  I can also see another screen real estate wasting versus on of the stream.  This display probably looks great on a phone in portrait mode, but  for those of us who primarily use a table in landscape mode, it is not a natural orientation and the landscape display is terribly non-functional.

Routines:

We need more than three modes.  All armed and all disarmed certainly make sense, but there are good cases for having “shades of gray” in between those two binary states.  People may want to have different zones armed and disarmed based on activities either ad hoc or scheduled.  Children playing in the back yard, landscapers working around the house, entertaining guests…all may require specific cameras being armed and disarmed.

Schedules should be subservient to Home & Away status.  If I’m away, I want a certain schedule.  If I’m home, I want a different schedule.  I think it would be unusual for someone to want home and away status completely separated from schedules.  It makes no sense to me.  I had to turn my schedules off when I’m away because they kept reverting to the schedule I’d want when I’m home…even though I’m away.

Speaking of schedules, would someone ever want to set off the siren based on the time of day?  It seems like an odd action to have while NOT having a very logical action of being able to turn off a camera or at least disarm it…given that we can’t have custom modes, this would allow us to potentially create our own custom modes.

I have lots more to say on the topic of automations, but I have things to do!