Actions, notifications per cam vs. globally

I started messing around with shortcuts last night and this one didn’t work as thought. I’ve looked around the site and I must have missed a more detailed explanation of what each action does.

Here’s the issue:
I set up a shortcut to turn off notifications for one specific camera, the action is called “Turn off notifications.” Works, no problem. I can go to the camera settings and see the switch is Off.

I set up a shortcut to turn off notifications for a second specific camera, the action is called “Turn off notifications.” Works, no problem. I can go to the camera settings and see the switch is Off.

I set up a shortcut to reverse this for all cameras and selected “Turn On All Device Notifications”. No joy. It appears one action deals with sending notifications and the global action deals with receiving notifications. Clearly different functionality. Is this explained somewhere or is it left up to trial and error? They are named almost identically. And, hasn’t the global receiving of notifications been handled with the bell on the home screen?

The solution is to set up a shortcut that hits each camera and turns on notifications, but that’s really not obvious until you troubleshoot and start making assumptions about functionality of actions.

BTW, the color scheme is not user friendly. Trying to read the description of shortcuts in this color scheme is not something easy to do as others have pointed out.

I agree about the turquoise color being hard to read. Can you point to the specific page(s) where this is giving you trouble so I can pass it up the chain? Screenshots would be helpful.

Thanks for pointing this out. There are three places to control push notifications:

  1. Per camera in the cameras Settings > Event Recording > Send Push Notification. This can be controlled by the camera owner or shared user and will affect both.

  2. Globally on an account basis by tapping the bell icon on the top right of the home screen, or using the switch in Account > Notifications. This affects only the owners or shared users login account on all devices they have logged in to the Wyze app.

  3. In the phone’s OS settings, which can enable or disable all notifications from any particular app. This applies to only that particular phone/tablet. (Note: this is not possible in some versions of Android.)

None of the above is probably new to you. But you can think of the three notification control options as three concentric rings or gates. If the inner gate (level-1, per camera) is closed, no notifications get beyond that level. If the gate is open, then the notification can attempt to get past the next level (level-2, account), etc.

I agree that the verbiage used for the level-2 control (global notifications by account) in the Shortcuts are could be better. The current “Turn On/Off All Device Notifications” sounds like it’s controlling all the separate switches at level-1 (per camera). But it is really controlling the single level-2 (global) switch. This verbiage should be changed to something like “Turn On/Off All Account Notifications”.

Also, the verbiage (explanation text) in Account > Notifications should be changed from “When this is disabled, you will no longer receive event notifications for all devices.” to something like “When this is disabled, you will no longer receive any event notifications for this account.”

Please let me know if you have better suggestions for how these two pieces of text in the app that I may use when I pass this up the chain.

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You’re asking about where the color scheme is a problem? If so, pretty much everywhere there is text on the turquoise. The fonts are crazy small and with turquoise, the contrast is so bad I’ve put a magnifying glass on my desk. So, the Home page, the edit shortcuts page, the edit shortcut page, the choose an icon page, the create shortcut page. Yep, pretty much every page with turquoise. The fonts on the other pages are too small also, especially for the color scheme.

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Thanks Rick, that was an excellent write up and something like that needs to be included in the documents for Shortcuts under what the actions do. I think of your #1 as Sending notifications and #2 as Receiving notifications and #3 as reporting (what was received). Unfortunately, with shared users and users sharing accounts, it becomes more complicated. For example: the bell, I would have thought was controlling only my phone receiving notifications where as Account => Notifications would be account wide since it is under account settings. This would give more granular control at the phone level. Anyway, the functionality needs to be documented for multiple reasons. First to manage user expectations and secondly, as a foundation for functionality changes. e.g. does this code change fit the documented path or destroy it?

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I had a similar experience. I setup favorite shortcut actions that are nicely shown on the Home screen but when I executed the ones to turn on or turn off all of my cameras i forgot to notice that the action was for only one camera. I set individual actions for the separate cameras and all works fine. Am I missing an available action that will execute for all cameras? I see the global ones for notifications on/off.

This is what prompted my OP. It isn’t very clear what each action does and the naming conventions are somewhat misleading in addition of this.

As explained above, the global notification option is per account, not per camera. Each individual camera action has to be added to the shortcut separately. If you have lots of camera’s that can be a pain. So I’ve added an item in the Roadmap post below to cover this. You can hop over there and vote for it. (You must click the VOTE button at the top for your vote to count.)

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Again, I think having profiles might be less confusing. Set the camera’s setting up for when you’re home, save profile, set the camera’s settings for when you’re away, save profile, then load entire profiles as needed or schedule them to load.

That is a good write up but, if you must explain something it might be better to revisit what you are having to explain. Making things self-evident can save a lot of time and frustration for all involved.

On the Home screen where you see each of your cameras more than half the area per each camera is white. I also understand how important white space is in UI.

To see important per camera information the user must click on a given camera and then on the next screen they still must figure out if what they are looking for is hiding behind the Gear or behind the More hamburger menu.

I always hated that feature that used to be in the Sunday paper called the Magic Eye and have an equal dislike for playing Where’s Waldo. For non-techie users it feels like hard work trying to figure this all out.

Potential important per camera pieces are

Notifications on Yes or No

Motion Detection on Yes or No

Motion Tagging on Yes or No

For 360 Cam Motion Tracking on Yes or No

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You left off the most important, is the camera even on? While I agree the UI is not user friendly and have been very vocal about it to the point of being in the doghouse, I think crowding the main page with more micro-fonts is going to meet resistance. If those are intended to be check boxes, that simply won’t do.

See " Design Finger-friendly Tap-targets"

Great guide for Ui\Ux design @OverWatch. I can see what you are pointing out about touch targets. I also can see all of those other best practices being ignored in the Wyze Cam app. My question for the Wyzecam team is are they interested in hearing feedback and working towards making the app better?

You have pointed out how camera profiles would solve other user requests. The same is true for fixing the UI. Fix those issues and then resources being used for support go away and sales will increase.

Adding new 1-off features can be a good thing but when you do this constantly while bad UI exist, you will wind up with feature creep which just compounds issues.

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Thanks, and don’t ask me. I’m already in the doghouse.

That and I wrote up a short summary of requests to improve the functionality and flow within the app. There are plenty of threads in #roadmap of other ideas. Get in there and vote.

This would be excellent!! Moving relevant actions to screens is something I worked with customers to build user cases around when I ran Design Thinking workshops. Always great to build from User perspective. We ran some of these with users being remote and got good info but never as good as when everyone is in the same room.