Ecotech Marine reeflink review

stevenliu9

Of all of Ecotech Marine products, the one that can really use some more engineering is the Reeflink and it’s associated software- Ecosmart Live.

First of all the Reeflink is almost necessary if you wish to operate your light and wavemakers using your computer, smartphone, or tablet. See my review on the light, and the wavemakers.

My electrical set up in the cabinet. Simple compare to most, yet tangled with wires even with a “wireless” reeflink.
Reeflink allows me to control the light and the wavemakers not just on the couch with my phone, but even when I am on vacation (though I can’t think of a reason to do that)
This is what my wife calls “toys for grown ups”. Not to be confused with the naughtier ones.

OK, so here comes my gripe: What good are products if you can’t operate them with ease to fully take advantage of all the features they have right? So rather than using some of the manual presets that comes with the light and the powerheads, I decided to get the reeflink. Only to realize that the controlling software both online, and the app are a huge mess.

First of all, allow me to say that I work in one of world’s largest online retailers so I know how important software engineering, user interface, and user experiences are to your customers. And in this regard, Ecotech Marine had completely failed.

To begin with, the software requires you to register for an account to even use. And to do so, you must then also surrender a bunch of personal information. I for one find that extremely unfair that not only I am paying for product, but paying for you to collect my personal information?

Secondly, the software or the app do not have an ease to access, comprehensive demo or instruction manual for users. The videos Ecotech Marine produced and are available in the public are extremely unhelpful and useless. The software is not only glitchy but are not intuitive at all.

Here is one of the screens you see on the app to select a preset light color temperature. But what you did not know is that some of them are not available during certain time of the day. There are no explanations of that anywhere.
Here is the light histogram. You can change it to show all the different light channels. But again the entire operation is very counter intuitive and this screen is very lacking in providing me information. I’d like to see that if you point your finger at any of the dots, a pop up window shows you details of the time, intensity of the light, as well as a dialog option to edit it or not
More confusion here. Though I have selected my overall brightness to be at 75%, why is it that at midday when my light is at its brightest it’s only showing 45% of the intensity, despite a “clear” day?
This setting may be simple if you only have 1 power head. But if you have multiple of them it suddenly gets extremely confusing. The software never explains what do sync mean vs. anti-sync. Also, the transition selection and the stating and ending speed is extremely confusing too. I have yet to figure out an answer to that.
Again, another counter intuitive move on the software developer’s part, when you fist click into any device, instead of showing you what the device is currently doing, the default screen is a constant speed, which is NOT what my device is doing right now. Who the hell designed this software? seriously!
This screen is the first screen you land when you open the app. It just seems to me that there are so many opportunities to display more information here that is being left out. How about a preview of the current light setting and the pump speed at the log in window?

So overall, the light and the wavemakers are great. But the software design is an absolute failure. I sincerely wish someone from the Ecotech Marine sees this post and reach out to me. Please fly me to your office to sit down with your UX designer and your software developers I will be more than happy to share all my ideas as a user to improve this product.