[quote author=micasaverde link=topic=4504.msg24279#msg24279 date=1285873037]
CMRancho, I’m sorry you’re so disappointed with everything we do. There’s some conflicting requests here. Keep in mind our team doesn’t have web designers; we always contract out that stuff. We only have coders on staff. We always hire the best design team we can. In this case, for the new micasaverde.com website we hired a highly rated U.S. design agency to do everything here on-shore. So far we’ve gotten very positive feedback on the site.
You’re right that we didn’t pull our developers off our core product (Vera) to have our internal staff do QA testing on the micasaverde.com site. We left it to the design agency. But, that’s because we want our core developers to stay focused working on our product. Don’t you agree that’s the right priority?
As far as your complaints… Some of them seem valid. But many are just matters of opinion and there are opinions the other way.
For example, your #1 complaint is that you can’t tell which lights are on and which are off. In the UI, lights that are on have a bright yellow light bulb icon, lights are off have a dim, gray one. Most people we talked to thought that was a good way to see what’s on and off. You obviously disagree and think that instead of reflecting this status in the icon, we should have changed the “active” color of the action buttons. To be honest, we discussed this, and, again, the majority thought it was more intuitive to have a consistent ‘selected’ state to a button (ie the green lit button).
As far as the other complaints, we discussed many times where to put the toolbox and mios market panels and discussed moving them to the bottom. But, the majority in our focus group felt it was better to keep them in a fixed place but make them collapsable so you can hide them if you don’t want to see them. So that’s what we did. As far as the save, yes, we did discuss doing iframes to make the banner at the top with the ‘save’ button stay visible at all times. But that meant there was more scrolling to see your devices when you’re on a small netbook with limited screen size.
I appreciate your feedback. But, since most of the items are matters of personal opinion, I don’t think it’s fair to blast us over them.
As far as reliability… Whenever we have a customer with a system that crashes, that is always #1 priority and we stop everything else. Two weeks ago, on a Friday afternoon a customer in Mexico reported that when he setup 2 Vera’s with separate Z-Wave networked across a bridged ethernet network with more than 100 devices, the unit ran out of memory and crashed. We had 2 programmers come in over the weekend and work 12 hour days both days and by Monday morning, we had a new firmware for him that fixed the issue. So, while many of the subjective complaints you make, like the green buttons, etc., do go into the suggestion box and aren’t always acted on, that’s not a sign of horrible customer service. That’s just because we know we can’t please everyone and if we change it other people will complain. When it comes to crashes, occasionally customers have run into a reproducible or persistent crash where his Vera is down and won’t come up. To my knowledge, in every case, we have had all programmers stop everything and work overtime until the problem was fixed, and I’m not aware of any customer that has been stuck in that situation for more than a day or two. Bottom line is that we’re doing the best we can…
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@micasaverde, Welcome back! 