the "in folder" field on the page presents a menu of all the folders you have defined for your devices in your Indigo database, plus the default "all". my instincts told me that the little up/down chevron icon on the right side of this field was to be clicked to bring up the pop-up menu. it turns out, you can click anywhere except on the icon to make the menu pop up - just a bit of counter-intuition that i faced on my first visit.
the page defaults with the in-folder set to "all", and as such, the list of devices (for my database, at least) is quite long. so scrolling is pretty essential for moving around the grid of displayed items. however, scrolling the page is "messy" because the page itself has a whole bunch of individual scrolling panes embedded - i.e., one each for most devices, showing "device details". so specifically when i try to scroll the main window, i find that the "scroll" action (e.g. two-finger scroll with my trackpad) got picked up by the device-details panes and stopping me from being able to scroll the main window. there's some addtional confusion caused by the inconsistent treatment of scrolling actions by the scrollable panes - in some circumstances you can keep scrolling indefinitely and the panes will keep "absorbing" the scroll actions, but then if you stop scrolling and start a new scroll action, AND the pane is already at its scrolling limit, then the pane will seemingly pass with scrolling action up to the parent window. the overall result is inconsistent/unpredicable experience when attempting to scroll.
a few other observations relative to the "device details" pane for each device:
- for me, a lot of my devices (e.g. lights) have seven lines of details. the window shows five, so while the window scrolls, but doesn't usually show much additional info. also, a bunch of my devices (sensors) actually have six lines, all of which are visible. in this case, the details pane is still scrollable, but scrolling doesn't actually reveal anything except empty space at the b bottom of pane.
- for my most common device types first two lines of "device details" are "on state" and "brightness" which are generally redundant wrt the items immediately above the window - namely a giant pair of buttons for "on" and "off" and a 0-100 slider. so it seems like including these in "device details" (and putting them at the top) is takes up a lot of screen and is not particularly useful.
- every instance of the "device details" pane has a line at the top that says "-----Device Details----". while this is descriptive, it also seems to be kind of a waste of space for something that might be considered "obvious". i note for example, there is no label "on state" above the on/off buttons; there is no "brightness" label above the brightness slider.
- i would offer that some kind of "exposure triangle" for device details might be useful so that device details pane remains compact/concealed until the triangle is clicked, in which case, the details are exposed. This would fit a lot more devices on a page, reduce the need to scroll, and also would solve the specific scrolling complication noted above.
- the level slider (brightness) can serve as both an indicator and user control. in the (common) case where a device such as a dimmer is in the 0/off state, the slider appears with a "0" rendered at its right end, which causes the confusing impression that moving the slider to the right would be moving it towards zero, which is of course not the case. perhaps some kind of separation between slider and numeric value is called for to defeat the impression that the number is part of the slider's scale.
- a relatively large amount of screen is taken up by "turn on" and "turn off" buttons for devices that support them, yet for some reason these two giant buttons don't actually change to show the STATE of the device. since most of the interface makes somewhat sparse use of color and fill, having the "Turn On" button filled in solid seems like a bad choice, because it visually suggests that it is providing visual indication of current state, even though it is not. seems like this could be greatly improved. if the two buttons are simply action buttons and nothing more, then just make them smaller simple buttons (i suggest eliminating the solid fill of the On button). perhaps better, use some kind of toggle widget that is more compact and combines control and state indicator.
and the list wouldn't be complete without a few additional "nice-to-have" items that would make it more useful, at least to me:
- additional ability to filter (beyond folder, name) such as device type, on state, protocol, model, etc.
- ability to specify how to sort the results
- some magic such that filter/sort criteria are part of the URL, so as to allow me to set up a useful view of data, bookmark the page, and return to the same view again later
