What we can learn about buttons from the Hue Tap Dial switch

First up, I love buttons. While voice is convenient and routines and other automations are the best way to keep a smart home running smoothly most of the time, buttons are the tool I reach for when life gets weird.

Maybe you’re sleeping poorly and want to get up in the middle of the night to read in the living room. Instead of shouting at Google or Siri to turn on the lamp, you’d rather quietly click a button. (This acknowledges that turning a lamp on or off at its actual switch might interfere with its connection and render it dumb.)

Or maybe you’re in bed and want to set off a routine without waking your partner; simply press a button and kick off the cascade of events you want to happen. So as you can imagine, when I got the Philips Hue Tap Dial switch device — which has four buttons and a rotary dial that can be programmed to handle a variety of scenes, bulbs, and routines — I was very excited.

Buttons are a tactile way of tweaking your typical smart home routines or settings to fit with the life you’re leading in that exact moment as opposed to the moment you had envisioned when you programmed your smart home a few months back.

The $49.95 Philips Hue Tap Dial switch device comes in white and black and works with the Philips Hue bridge, bulbs, and accessories. It’s also the third Hue button to find a spot in my home.

I purchased the original Hue Tap when it came out back in 2014 and still have it today, operating my living room lights. Roughly a year ago, I spent $29.99 on a Hue Smart Button, which is magnetically attached to my bedside table lamp and controls my husband’s and my bedside lamps with a variety of presses. It’s far easier to press the button once to turn off both of our lamps at the same time than to tell Alexa to turn off the master bedroom or to turn off each lamp individually. (Plus, sometimes Alexa doesn’t hear me very well, forcing me to repeat myself.)

I didn’t need this button, but the addition of the rotary dial was novel enough that I wanted to try it. Initially I had a hard time setting up the button because my Hue app was still showing the older versions of accessories. But clearing the app’s cache and storage and then restarting it solved the problem.

While you can set up the button to control lights in a single room or across the house, I chose to control the devices across my home. But if I had a movie room this would be an excellent device for that use case, especially if I had some of Hue’s lights synched with my television.

You can program each of the four buttons with a light or set of lights and set them to play a scene or simply to turn on the appropriate lighting for the time of day. For the first button press, I set my bedroom lights for the time of day lighting, and I set the colored Hue light in my kid’s room for the second one. We haven’t worked out a code yet, but the button controlling the lamp in my kid’s room is cool, because I can set up a scene or colors to cycle through with the button that will change the color of that light. Which means I could use this button as a way to communicate with my kid without yelling from another room.

The rotary dial can be programmed to dim the lights in a single room or in a zone that you create. This is where I think using it as a movie room controller would be nice, because you could customize your lights without having to, say, tell Alexa to dim the lights to 30%, or rely on a preset setting that doesn’t work with the current lighting situation.

The dial is where the idea of physical buttons shines. You get the ability to control a connected device and customize it without resorting to guessing what specifically to say to a voice assistant or relying on a pre-programmed setting that doesn’t take into account that you’re watching a movie with a kid who hates the dark, or that the sun hasn’t set yet and it’s brighter than you’d like.

But the customizations and many choices of this product also have me somewhat overwhelmed. I can’t possibly use all the features or remember exactly what each tap or subsequent tap does, which has led me to realize that the perfect button for most rooms in a home would have about four options and a dial to fine-tune brightness — or even a dial that fine-tuned whatever the last known command was for the room.

So if I’m in the dining room and tell my digital assistant to set up dinner party lighting I could then dial up or down the brightness based on that last command. I could even brighten those lights or the scene as a subtle indication that the party is over, or hit a button for normal lighting as an abrupt end to the evening. Then I could dial up or down my normal lighting, since that was the last command.

For special situations, or homes with people who might be hearing impaired, a more complex button with many options, like the Hue Tap Dial switch, might make sense. But I’d like to see a way to label the buttons. I also don’t think giving each button more than a short press and a long press is a great idea. I like the idea of being able to cycle through scenes or options with up to 10 presses of each button, but I don’t think it’s realistic to expect people to know that pressing button three and then hitting it six times in rapid succession will get you to the romantic lighting you like.

I imagine all these features got crammed onto a button because being able to say that $50 gets you more than 40 different options in lighting control helps justify the high cost. Ideally I’d spend about the same amount for a more limited feature set that offers me three or four pressed options and a dial to dim it up and down — especially if that dial was tied to the state of the last given command as opposed to something that was preprogrammed.

What would I call that? Limited flexibility? I think that’s what a smart button should provide: a way to physically confront the choices made by a smart home and adapt them to the current reality. As our homes get smarter and more complicated, that ability will only become more important.