Something I’ve really wanted to see in glossary or guide form is a primer defining all of the UI elements in the Wyze app, because a lot of users—especially those posting for the first time with a problem—seem to have difficulty adequately explaining what part of the app they’re using and having issues with in a way that other community members can immediately grasp the nature of the problem and provide assistance. That’s one reason it’s so frequently necessary to ask good follow-up questions, which can be helpful for a number of reasons:
- They (hopefully) elicit better and more useful/detailed information from the user experiencing the problem.
- They (hopefully) help to shed light on the primary and potentially ancillary issues and can tease out whether more than one problem is occurring.
- They promote user-to-user dialogue, which (hopefully[1]) increases engagement and makes the community better.
- They contribute to a record that might be helpful to others experiencing the same problem(s) in the future.
I enjoy the back-and-forth involved in problem solving, and I especially like the aspect that allows me to try to educate others (so that hopefully they’ll be helpful to others in turn), but I realize that even that process can be frustrating to some who are already frustrated and just want a more immediate fix for an issue, perhaps because of an urgent need with a camera or something. In that case, guidance about how to efficiently describe a problem in the first place—using the “correct” words in some sort of “standard” way that other users will understand—could be helpful…but then you gotta ask, “Who’s going to actually read and use that?” (How often do we see user requests or suggestions for new features or products and have to direct them to How to Use the Wishlist because they apparently haven’t already read that?)
Back to my original point, a guide could be useful, because there are a number of Forum topics where users have requested more thorough documentation about a product (usually wanting a PDF or some other more detailed manual to supplement the Quick Start Guide[2]), so a UI elements guide could potentially fill some of that void, especially if it came directly from Wyze’s design team. As disjointed, fragmented, and piecemeal as the various parts of the app often seem, I’d like to imagine that somewhere Wyze has created some sense of a style guide for internal use in order to promote consistency for the UI/UX, and hopefully that would include labels and definitions for all the elements. While I wouldn’t expect them to share everything within such a document (if it exists), at least exposing the preferred terms for interface parts could be helpful for user-to-user communication so that we don’t have to guess at what some things are.
For instance, if I tap on a Cam v4’s tile within the Wyze app to get to the Live Stream screen (which I believe is also referred to that camera’s main “plugin page”[3]), beneath the live view pane is a row of virtual feature buttons, which I used to refer to as a “control strip” because I wasn’t sure what else to call it and that’s what made sense to me, but apparently Wyze refers to this UI element as the
Since reading that, I’ve tried to be consistent about writing “menu bar” instead of “control strip” when attempting to assist other users. Things like this would be good to know so that we’re all speaking the same language.
What’d really be helpful, I think, is an illustrated guide with labeled elements linking to definitions and explanations of the elements along with gestures that can be used with said elements, such as…
- double-tap the live view pane to zoom in/out
- pinch/spread the live view pane to to zoom out/in
- spread/pinch the microSD card recording timeline to zoom in/out
That gets back to the first few entries in this topic with some possibilities:
double-tap
Tap one’s fingertip twice in rapid succession on a control in order to achieve a specific effect, similar to double-clicking a mouse button. For instance, double-tapping the view pane while watching a camera’s live view or microSD card playback will zoom into the portion of the image that was tapped; double-tapping again will zoom out. Double-tap can also be used to zoom in/out while navigating some cameras’ microSD card recording timelines. Using this gesture zooms in or out to a defined or predetermined set point. Finer zoom control can be achieved with pinch or spread.
pinch
Place one’s thumb and index finger (typically, though other digits could be used to create two distinct points of contact) some distance apart on a control and move them together in a “pinching” gesture. This gesture is often used to zoom out of an image or other UI element, acting as if the user is trying to bring the points below the fingertips together on the screen. It is the opposite of spread.
spread
Place one’s thumb and index finger (typically, though other digits could be used to create two distinct points of contact) together on a control and move them away from one another in a “spreading” gesture. This gesture is often used to zoom in on an image or other UI element, acting as if the user is trying to move the points below the fingertips apart—spread them—on the screen and is the opposite of pinch. Synonyms sometimes encountered: stretch, un-pinch, anti-pinch.
Incidentally, when you use Markdown headings (# example), Discourse gives you a nice little link icon that you can use to link to that specific point of a post, and you can see that if you hover your mouse pointer over a heading. You can copy that URL and use it to link to a specific portion of a post rather than the beginning of the post itself, like this:
[example](https://forums.wyze.com/t/wyze-glossary/334876#p-1019325-example-1)
That might be helpful for something like the table near the top of this topic, if one were so inclined to use it that way.