Dashboard Design
Internal tools and admin screens, which almost nobody designs properly. Dispatch boards, analytics and the screens a team lives in all day.
How this is done
One question, answered before the scroll
Every dashboard exists because somebody keeps asking the same question. Find that question and answer it in the largest thing on the screen. Everything else is support, and most of it can be a layer down.
- Ask who opens it and how often. A screen glanced at hourly is a different object from one studied monthly.
- Give the answer one number, set larger than anything else on the page.
- Color only the exception. If everything is colored, nothing is flagged.
- Show now against recently. A number with nothing to compare it to is trivia.
- Check it from across a room. Internal screens are read standing up more often than anyone plans for.
Try it
The same board, four rooms
One shop floor, four places it might be read. The data never changes; the distance between the screen and the eye does.
Reno, Nevada
Every bay, every job, right now
What is in, what is waiting on parts, and what is going out before five.
Open the boardOchre bowl$48
Sage vase$62
Set for six feet away. Half the type sizes you would pick for a desk, and no interaction at all, because nobody walks over to click.
Dense, interactive, built for somebody sitting down with a keyboard. The default, and wrong the moment the screen goes on a wall.
Reads as a handover sheet, because half the shops still print one. No color at all, so a black and white printer does not lose meaning.
Everything grey until something needs a person. The strongest option and the hardest to sell, because a calm screen looks like it is doing nothing.
It depends
The same rule, four projects
None of the above survives contact with a real brief unchanged. Here is where the decision moves, and what moves it.
Glanced at hourly
One number, enormous, and a color only when something needs a person.
Studied once a month
Room for the detail underneath. This one is read sitting down.
On a wall in the room
Set for six feet away. Half the type sizes you would choose for a desk.
Read on a phone
One column, most important first. Nobody scrolls sideways through a table.
The set
The set
Elsewhere
If one of these is close
Working on something and unsure which way to take it? Tell us which of these you keep coming back to and we will work it up against your actual brief. Most projects start as somebody pointing at two directions and saying the truth is somewhere between them. That is a good way to start.
New pieces go up on the Dashboard Design board on Pinterest before they land here. The other sets sit on the design index, and what we build with all of it is what we do.