You’ll notice it’s a little more organized and user friendly when you first arrive. You can either search articles, click on the category you’re interested in, or find popular articles/FAQ’s/Downloads, etc.
If you click into one of the categories, you will then be able to click on the specific device you have (note: spacing is a little off – this will be fixed):
I’m checking to see if there’s a way to organize the articles a bit better within the categories, but for now it seems like it’s doing it based on popularity.
Thanks for the fantastic update @Eric_Inovelli! I really wish more companies would adopt this level of openness.
It’s great to hear you are focusing on your foundation this year. I feel like companies frequently overlook the value of building a solid foundation, to help facilitate their growth.
I feel like the best smart houses are the heavily automated smart houses. Technology is here to do my bidding, and eliminate repetitive tasks. I don’t consider it helping if I need to manually trigger something, or ask the house to do something on my behalf.
Good automation takes time to perfect, so don’t lose hope if it takes a little longer than expected. As your products keep proving, good things come to those who wait
One initial suggestion that comes to mind is building on the categories.
If possible you should extend that view into each top-level category, instead of the more text heavy view offered currently.
@kreene1987 makes a good point as well. In some cases the process is the same regardless of the device or the hub. It might be worth creating general topics using some common verbiage, and then have device or hub specific “keys” if you will. That’ll save you writing the same article over and over again.
Inovelli switches and smart hubs can do a ton of cool stuff. But once you get past the obvious (timers, motion sensors, etc) there’s a lot of very cool but non-obvious automations to be done that can improve quality of life (and WAF). This would be generally non-hub-specific but could include specific procedures for popular hubs.
Put differently- all this tech is a giant tub of Legos. Give people some pictures of stuff they can build and that will both excite people and drive up demand for Legos.
An example of what I mean- program an event so at some point at night (or while house is in sleep mode / night scene is active), the ‘default dim level’ on a switch is changed to say 30%. Thus, you can go around the house turning lights on, but your dark-adapted eyes won’t be blinded by a light going on full.
On a similar thread- the config button. Right now most of mine run a scene that sets that light on at ~25-50% (depending on the light). Having an instant ‘on dim’ button is very convenient and has very high WAF.
Or, stuff to do with sensors. IE, when a ‘goodnight mode’ button is pressed, check all the sensors in the house and if all doors and windows are closed, then send the bedroom switch a 5 second green blink, otherwise send red blink.
The ‘LED bar is red when garage door is open’ one is another good one.
I love this!! As someone that is in the newer side to z wave this would be a big help.
I hope you don’t change the ability for light/dark mode on the site. I get a good giggle out of pressing the switch and it turning on. This makes you guys seem more open and user based (to me).
I also currently love how you package your products, but I do wish you included more wire jumpers. I have yet to have a switch in my house that’s as simple as only needing a neutral jumper.
I’d suggest that you make your own and not use the Inovelli ones.
1 - They’re a little short.
2 - The tinned ends make them hard to properly wrap in a bundle.
3 - You can’t mix a tinned end and a regular 14 ga Romex conductor in the same set of holes. The tinned one is fatter and won’t tighten properly on the Romex.
1 - Buy a short roll of Romex. You probably want 14 ga, maybe 12 ga depending on your circuit.
2 - Cut an appropriate length from the spool.
3 - Using a pair of pliers, pull the white (or whatever you need) conductor from the Romex sheath.
4 - Strip the insulation off the ends.
Thanks Eric, I love that you guys are so open and look for feedback all the time. I think it looks great and I like the reorganization. I know I’m very visual and the slightest difference draws the eye to it. On your product support page, the Fan/Light switch picture is slightly different and looks off. I know it’s petty, but it makes it look unfinished.
Hey Kevin – I’m working on the forums and would love more of your thoughts on this.
(And anyone else who wants to chime in!)
I was thinking of re-organizing the various categories to make it more consistent with our website and support page where we lead with the device and then follow with the hub. In other words, you come for help with your specific device and from there select the hub you have and you should be able to find your answer.
Anyway, kind of like this mock-up (never-mind the icons, they’re placeholders):
When you click on Switches, there will be sub-categories such as:
Wiring Discussion
Firmware Discussion
General Discussion (ie: non-hub related issues)
SmartThings
Hubitat
Home Assistant
Other
This would be similar across the device categories.
Tags would include the various hubs, device, model and firmware version
Am I missing anything?
You’re welcome – we wouldn’t be who we are without you all so I appreciate you as well
I think @Brianna_Inovelli found out about this the hard way this past week when the auto email around abandoned cart went haywire lol (sorry to all who got a ton of emails)!
Yes, totally agree – unfortunately this turned out to be a Zoho limitation and we can’t edit these pages to mimic the front page
That’s a good point – we’ll get our collective brainstorm hats on. @anon88759745 let’s keep this in mind.
Dude… yes. I forgot to tell you (geez, it’s already been 16 days) that Brianna’s and my brain was spinning when we read this. Like we could create this cookbook and link to it with one of the auto-emails after purchase.
Example would be if someone buys a Red Series Dimmer and has Hubitat – we could cater the cookbook to their, “tastes” and it would only show, “recipes” related to Hubitat.
Yes! This is perfect. I love this idea man, thank you!
I’m a big dark mode guy and love the icon too – glad you like it lol!
Thank you, that really means a lot. Brianna works really hard at designing those and she’s been crushing it. Wait until you see the new design (based on community feedback FYI) – it is amazing.
As for the jumper wires, it’s something we can consider for sure as I don’t think they’re too expensive. But as @Bry suggested, you could buy some Romex at Lowes/HD and create your own. I think I bought a 50ft one and it’s lasted me my entire installations.
Good eye! Not petty at all – I love the attention to detail. What happened was I couldn’t find a pic of the fan/light that matches and I thought it would work, but it’s definitely off in color and resolution and I’ve been meaning to fix it. Thanks for the reminder – I’m going to add it to the list above so I don’t forget again!
Can confirm this one. We seriously appreciate you all being patient as we try to perfect our customer experience. We’ll be fully launching our new automated emails based off of actions on site. This means when you leave your cart abandoned you’ll get an email reminder (this has been edited so you should only be getting two emails total, one within an hour after abandon and one after 24 hours).
I’ve also updated our purchase email series. You’ll be getting your first email after purchase, this email will include your purchased products along with some use cases to show you what your new products can do. (I will mention that the layout and design of our blogs is also something we’re working on editing as it’s not nearly as nice as we’d like it to be.)
The second and third purchase emails you’ll receive will provide you with the install links you need to setup the products in your cart. The links should be specific to the hub you have selected in your account settings! (These emails will also contain your tracking number)
As you start to get our new emails, I’d love to hear any feedback or possible edits that might be beneficial for you! Thanks as always for helping us create the best possible experience for our community Now I have to start letting you know about the rewards program…
This is exactly the direction I was thinking, need a parent for device class (switch, bulb, plug, etc.), then you can “tag” it with a hub or other specific item within that parent category. I would stray from a child category though, because there might be parallel issues that might help someone else outside of that “child” section. I vote parent, then tag only within that parent:
Wiring
Hardware (maybe even a tag for LZW31-SN, LZW36, etc.)
I’m not sure if this could be sorted/filtered by a specific “tag” but that would be amazing. Also not sure if you could map keywords in the post to tags, like:
Hub: Home Assistant == Home Assistant, HA, Hass.io, Hassio, etc.
Hub: Smartthings == Down, Crash, Sucks, Support, Trash, etc. (<-- my opinion alone)
I dont have a suggestion really more of just an overall comment in that its so difficult to setup an organized forum in smart homes because of the different hubs. And sometimes the issue is a inovelli side issue, other times its a hub issue. People posting in the (wrong) more trafficked sub-forum because they want more exposure to their issue (im guilty of this sometimes lol). Basically what I’m saying is, good luck!
I think you’re probably right. Parent, and then tag only within the parent. Stackexchange/github do a pretty good job of this. Stackexchange also has related comments/questions on the side and then ranks them according to relevance score. I’m actually thinking of a way to organized a lot of the info thats out there right now for a few hubs, sort it, and create a more robust wiki for it.
@kreene1987 and @piratesgoarrrrr – I’ve started to make some progress here, but I’ve run into some challenges from a UI perspective so I’m going to have to outsource part of this project.
I created (and will be working on the overall structure this week) a, “test” category here: Switches - Inovelli Community
Essentially, you’d click on the, “Switches” category on the main page (https://community.inovelli.com) and it would take you to that category page.
From here, you can choose from a few categories. I decided to break it out in the following ways – hopefully we’re tracking:
General Discussion (troubleshooting, other general topics)
Wiring Discussion
Firmware
Wiki/How-To’s
I think wiring should be split from the general discussion as it’s often very different than normal troubleshooting which is more than often hub related.
Firmware will be what we put out (beta and/or production versions) that can be commented on (bugs/enhancements, etc).
Finally, I didn’t realize this was a feature, but Discourse has a Wiki option (thanks @piratesgoarrrrr – I saw you mention Wiki and didn’t realize this was an option) and with a little tweaking, I was able to make it usable (stock option is kind of meh – plug-in made it awesome). An example, is located here: https://community.namati.org/t/faq-frequently-asked-questions/1467
I’d love your ideas for Wiki’s btw.
Tagging
Here’s where I’m running into issues. Currently, when you try to select a tag, it shows everything in abc order. Sure, you can limit the tags per category, but it still is just messy and I’m guessing the average person is not going to tag properly.
What I’m trying to see/build is something like a dynamic checklist where you select, “parent” tags (ie: hub or wiring type) and the relevant, “child” tags will show up (ie: ST, Hubitat, HA / 3-Way, 4-Way, etc).
I actually haven’t used discourse, but I’m looking into it and it looks interesting. I think the biggest thing with this is going to be trial and error. See which subs get the most traffic, check heat maps to see if users are even hovering over certain sub links, and your time on page. I’m normally a fan of structuring it even further (i.e. General/NodeRed, General/ShowOffs) but in this case I think it just may add more confusion.
Tagging: Is there anything that will autotag based on words found in the post? Or force the user to choose two or three tags (that could be autogenerated from the content).
I think I would probably work on this structure, and then start building out the wiki’s. Actually before the wiki’s I would make sure to clean up and organize all of the info pages on each of the products. For example, (this page) I would start looking at feedback from users on. I’d then go through and start finishing the content on the pages (like this one), updating this one to reflect the changes made in ozw 1.6 or at least indicate this is not needed any longer. From there, you can start pulling these into the wiki or any knowledge management software really. If the quality of tags you’re getting is low, you can always try and gamify it with some rewards system in order to improve submissions I know that has worked.
I like your tagging structure btw. Also happy to help however I can.
Just wanted to give a quick update here as this project has really taken on a life of its own and we’re really excited about it and what it will do for not only the community but for people who haven’t even found us yet.
The, “Foundation” phase located up in the initial post is tracking well and @anon88759745, @Brianna_Inovelli and I have been literally headphones in and locked into working on this. A lot of it is, “behind the scenes” stuff like keyword research, SEO optimization, forum cleaning/optimization (Wiki), and more. There likely will be little releases that compound overtime vs one major release. We’ll try to keep everyone in the loop as best as we can.
What I’m personally excited about are a couple of projects within Project Glow up that I think will really make things much easier for people and that is the Wiki development and Appsheet development.
These are things that were discovered recently and have really taken up a lot of my time and resources, but overall, they were pain-points that needed to be addressed.
As you know many knowledge-base articles become outdated quickly and leads to frustration as well as increased tickets. By developing a community driven wiki, we are able to utilize our greatest strength… you all. Everyone has their own specialty and can help out in their own way vs our small team having to learn everything and try to stay up to date on all platforms, changes, etc.
This is going to be a major undertaking and I’ll need a lot of help from you all to set this up properly
The other pain-point we have is helping people understand what bulbs and/or fans work properly with our switches. Improper bulbs can lead to flickering issues, while improper fans can lead to damaged fans or switches, etc. It’s hard for us to test every single bulb and/or setup, so given the fact that we’ve sold a ton of switches, we should have a ton of data out there about what bulbs and/or fans work or don’t work.
To solve for this issue, we’ll be using a combination of MS Forms + Flows + MS Excel to create a living document (thanks @amdbuilder). Taking this a step further, we’re having someone use Appsheet to turn that data into a usable web-app to easily find what bulbs and/or fans work with our switches.
Good news here is that we’ll be piloting a scheduling system with our CS reps to where you’ll be able to schedule some time on their calendar to chat via phone if necessary. This is a step in the right direction of our goal to have full on live support.
The reason we’re able to do this is bc we’re hoping the wiki and other areas will cut down on ticketing.
@Brianna_Inovelli has successfully finished the initial email automation and will be starting the final email automations shortly.
Indeed. There are definitely advantages to adopting their full stack, which is basically my day job. When you get a little bigger you should check out their Teams Room devices. Those are really fun!
