I can finally turn my heating down! I feel like a bag of domesticated coconut.

It’s something I often hear complaints about. Several of the Home Assistant users I know love the way it integrates all their smart devices together, but say they find making good dashboards difficult.

Improvements like proper drag and drop and better auto categorisation and population will go a long way to help them. The old default dashboard that just lumped everything in one screen isn’t a great way to get started.

Absolutely. While I love fully automated solutions there is also stuff that needs an user interface more complex than just a button. I love how much easier it has become to create personalized dashboards that even can adjust themselves based on the situation.

I think it depends on the user. A few years ago asking about a clock card for the dashboard to the community would get the response of ‘why? How will that help you automate’.

Personally I found home assistant because I was trying to make a replacement for my google displays - for use in the kitchen, or alarm clocks for example. There still isn’t my ideal hardware to make these displays but I know some people are perfectly happy to repurpose a tablet and stick it on the wall.

I didn’t know anything about yaml and still use the UI to make my automations. But the dashboard is an easy way to feel like I’ve accomplished something especially when I’m just starting out. I might dip my toes into yaml for a card here or to edit my automation there but having to use it for everything up front can be very off-putting to a new user.

So all these dashboard improvements are very exciting, I think, for making home assistant seem more accessible to less technical people who are just starting out on their HA journey. And those of us who just like to make things pretty as well as functional but don’t have time to learn how to code it.

Defintely for me. Trying to make home assistant easy enough to use for family members, guests, etc. is a continued source of frustration. I’ve not had time to try out the new dashboard stuff, so no idea if it actually help, but it’s an area that defintely needs improvement.

Adding devices, casting automations, and writing scripts all work pretty perfectly for my needs. But making a visual effective design for a variety of dashboards for different sized screens is time consuming at best.

I could not care less, for me its about automating tasks, not pushing buttons.

Ah is that what had broken my horseshoe graph? The custom graphs come up a unrecognised types whatever form I try.

Yes! Such a small throwaway line for something that really makes automations way better. I had a Choose block based Notify automation which now has a single Notify action at the end with just the variables being declared in the Choose options instead of having the Notify action specified in each option.