Thanks for the Kudos, my eyes and ears both suffer the ravages of age… I often ponder what system will go next. However, my observation of almost all printed text could use with some readability improvement… As far as hearing goes I send blessings to the individual that invented the ‘off’ switch
I don’t know, masterep, the oldest “team member” at Wyze is like 22. Co-founder @WyzeGwendolyn is still in college, I think.
Empathy for The Olds may be something they have to gin up on company retreats. Better than nothing, I guess, but still… 
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27, actually. 
And I think I’m probably obligated to state that I’m not a co-founder though I have been with Wyze since before the launch of Wyze Cam v1. 
Anyway, I sent this conversation over to the Design Team so that everyone’s voice can be heard. Thanks for the feedback, everyone!
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Mahalo and Aloha 'e to you WyzeGwendolyn
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“Give me landscape mode (for my iPad), or give me death.”
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Hi gang! I’m a product designer at Wyze. Thanks for making this post- I’ve asked Gwen to blow my Slack up with any and all accessibility-related posts they find anywhere. I can help shed some light on where we’re at with our accessibility efforts.
How our app got to where it is today is probably a discussion for another time. Wyze took on millions of users and had to build the app faster than it could scale- and without a design team that could plan and strategize a direction for our app. Wyze leaned heavily on partners. The good news is we now have a design team. Nothing new will ever leave our studio that is not highly accessible.
So the problem to solve now is how to deal with the current beast. For the next 2.11 or 2.12 release, I redesigned a lot of core components- like the header, so it not only meets WCAG contrast ratios, but will be rated AAA. I also pushed out a 100% new Events feed which will be ready around the same time. For our 2.10+ release, I sneaked in a tweak to the footer text, but I’m hoping we can give it a full redesign soon. I’m redesigning Rules and Shortcuts as of today, but no ETA on that yet.
I believe that is a large chunk of areas in our app that fail basic accessibility. Are there any other specific items that are difficult to see that I could tackle?
@angus.black @The_Tango @Big_monkey @jarussell @myswtest @jerryjam @bradgonemad @colquhouncb @joenapoleon @lsintampa
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True, app-wide landscape mode for tablets, in my case an iPad Pro, is still missing. Due to a physical disability, it’s very difficult for me to rotate the iPad 90°, just to read the main screen and menus, every time I launch the app. I’ve posted repeatedly about this over the past two years. Would very much appreciate this being fast-tracked, as I’m sure those with a keyboard attached to their tablet would. Thanks for the update, by the way.
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I will be curious if this thread goes the way all the other “problem” threads go. We complain, whine, make suggestions, respond to each other and never get any meaningful reply from Wyze except "we are looking into it. After a while the thread dies - exactly what Wyze wants to happen. Nothing really changes.
My first PC was when MS-Dos was it & I was the only person in the company curious enough to learn the system. And yes the years of looking at monitors have taken their toll. Wyze should remember the history of Lotus. I will get to see the mighty fall again.
Start a different thread - now is the perfect time.
Agree on a redesign (never liked the light green hue).
But this goes far beyond Wyze and many other companies.
Microsoft started this trend with “muted and subdued” colors with Win 10 and many apps that rides on top of it (think Office 365 as an example). Those of use who are old enough to have used Windows and Office apps when fields were well defined and contrast noticeable, are missing it in these days when “vagueness” seems to drive UX design.
The smaller the screen, the more important it is that fields and boxes are clearly defined and visible. Wyze is no exception. And screen real estate could be better used as well (like adding a consistent home button).
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Nice to hear from you Austin,
In the events tab, often times I get over 100 video clips thus requiring me to scroll down numerous times to load them all for deletion… A real pain if you have a bunch of cameras… Is there any shortcut to this issue??
I will suggest the entire app developing team learn more about the aging eye of people after the age of forty as well as those with stigmatism and/or born with poor or weaken contrast separation.
https://www.lrc.rpi.edu/patternbook/techniques/agingeye.asp
Besides vision and hearing, finger dexterity also degenerates especially those with pre-diabetes and diabetes conditions for all ages. As an example the placement of the “on and off” button for the Wyze cameras is super prone to encourage accidental engagements.
I wish the university system still taught bio mechanical and ergonomics efficiencies today, which used to at the core of process engineering disciplines for industrial process, which it appears would greatly help Wyze’s app development.
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@milehiguy Specifically for a tablet, I will look into what that would require technically. I know a phone landscape mode would be very difficult for the same reasons that a dark mode would be difficult- the app was built very quickly without any components. So an update would require a 100% redevelopment.
But it might be possible for us to make a mode that would add margins to the side during a landscape mode. I will inquire about this.
We had planned a 3.0 app and would probably be well on our way through it by now if the virus didn’t hit. So the 3.0 rebuild was pushed to 2021 while we secure our planned Series B funding. Very possible it would simply be an alternative though, rather than a replacement, similar to SmartThings. In the meantime, the existing app will see some massive changes.
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I’m sorry you feel that way. Your frustration is understandable. The difference this time is everything in my first reply above is designing and in development 
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Please, please, please bifurcate The single Wyze app into a home and a health, two independent applications.
Or please show an example of how the new Wyze scale would be a dependent and integrated component of all of the other Wyze devices.
I for one would not like to upgrade my application to use the Wyze scale and jeopardize Stability and usability of all of my other Wyze products. As my 2 1/2 years of experience with Wyze has shown, it is very likely an update for one product will disrupt the operation and usability of another product by many ways within the Single app.
Thanks for the article! I will share with the product team.
For some background, I came from Microsoft, where accessibility was practically a religion. Products were blocked from shipping if they were not accessible- no matter cost. They spent a remarkable amount of resources training us up through workshops and talking with differently-abled users.
Our home page is pretty terrible- it’s more of a device list. I’m hoping to move us away from the idea of “devices” and move toward “capabilities” that surface controls and insights. I will keep your input in mind when designing it and make sure it is done the right way this time.
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I appreciate you coming to the forum with a real response to this.
You seem to be going in a direction that would cover my problems with the app. Tiny fonts and very little contrast.
We have been told that implementing Dark Mode is much more difficult than it would normally be but no real detail as to why.
A few of us are developers for other platforms and would understand an explanation.
I don’t like the idea of one app for all Wyze products. Cameras, sensors,don’t fit well with scales and bands.
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I wasn’t aware of this issue regarding event deletion- I made a note on my desk and will attempt to replicate the issue when our developers are finished with their initial redevelopment and have the pattern fixed. Thanks for pointing this out!
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Couple of problems. With design, the US design team is me, two others, and a manager. We need to triple in size. Then we will have the ability to create a design system from what exists. Then, we can create the design system we need. And then it can be applied to the app.
With development, we don’t have a component library and there isn’t a structure to the app. A lot of things are built custom. There is no single source of truth that a theme is generated from. It is a big bowl of spaghetti, due to our early remarkably quick growth. With many apps a designer can say “Okay, these existing grayscale colors can switch over to this. And we can use a few special rules like using lighter grays to represent higher elevation. Done.” The problem is that we don’t have that existing theme file to convert. So every view would have to be redesigned. This would take about 6 months to get out into the world, we would celebrate, and then we would be faced with a doubled workload thereafter due to creating a light and dark mode for each screen. This is why we need a design system to pull from.
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