iOS Capture and Action Menus Enhancement
I would like to suggest a possible improvement for the Captures and Actions menu in the mobile app. Right now it brings up:
* Unarmed 24/7
* Armed 24/7
* Armed Sunrise to Sunset
* Armed Sunset to Sunrise
* Mail
* Set Override
When you hit Set Override, you get a huge menu with alternating Unarmed and Armed selections. The main problem with this submenu is that the text starts with Unarmed or Armed, but it is actually sorted on time.
Instead I would suggest moving the time component element to the submenu. I would have the main menu be:
* Unarmed
* Armed
* Mail
And the submenu for Unarmed and Armed be:
* 24/7
* Sunrise to Sunset
* Sunset to Sunrise
* Next Scheduled Event
* 1 Hour
* 2 Hours
* 3 Hours
* 4 Hours
* 5 Hours
* 6 Hours
The concept of override doesn’t really need to be exposed as separate concept. The first 3 in the submenu are obviously setting the base schedule, while the rest of the submenu are obviously temporal.
My first thought is that I either want to Arm, or in my usual case Unarm. Once I know that, then I think about the amount of time.
* Unarmed 24/7
* Armed 24/7
* Armed Sunrise to Sunset
* Armed Sunset to Sunrise
* Set Override
When you hit Set Override, you get a huge menu with alternating Unarmed and Armed selections. The main problem with this submenu is that the text starts with Unarmed or Armed, but it is actually sorted on time.
Instead I would suggest moving the time component element to the submenu. I would have the main menu be:
* Unarmed
* Armed
And the submenu for Unarmed and Armed be:
* 24/7
* Sunrise to Sunset
* Sunset to Sunrise
* Next Scheduled Event
* 1 Hour
* 2 Hours
* 3 Hours
* 4 Hours
* 5 Hours
* 6 Hours
The concept of override doesn’t really need to be exposed as separate concept. The first 3 in the submenu are obviously setting the base schedule, while the rest of the submenu are obviously temporal.
My first thought is that I either want to Arm, or in my usual case Unarm. Once I know that, then I think about the amount of time.
Comments
-
Thanks for the feedback and suggestions. I understand where you are coming from - the override menu is a bit unwieldy - but we have put significant thought into these menus, and we feel that the current implementation actually does make the most sense.
Under your scheme, you are muddling together schedules and overrides into the same menu, but we want to keep these separate as they are separate concepts. Hence our implementation of the first menu for schedules only, and the submenu for overrides only.
Under your scheme: imagine that it's night time; you click on the "Armed" menu, and then select "Sunrise to Sunset". When you do this, the camera will actually disarm (because the Sunrise to Sunset schedule only arms cameras in the daytime). So, you have selected the "Arm" option to disarm a camera, which doesn't make sense.
Also, what happens when you select the "Unarmed" menu and then "Sunrise to Sunset"? There is no schedule for this. The equivalent is the "Armed Sunset to Sunrise" schedule, but this isn't semantically the same as the UI selection, so would be confusing.
Maybe one thing we can do is rearrange the override menu so that the sort order is better (i.e. with the numbers first, like "1 hour - armed" or something like that). We'll consider this for the next update. -
Perhaps remove or disable menu items that don't make sense given the current context. As it is today, you can select armed for a hour when the camera is already armed. If those items weren't there, it would also make it much easier to use.
