Dashboards are the future

There was a time when programming was so laborious and complex that it was difficult just to achieve the main objective within budget and without the poor techie losing their hair.   However, these days, code is built on top of other code and the world of open-source has helped reduce dull repetitive tasks to allow everyone to get to the cool fun interesting stuff.

Clients are rarely super technical so overwhelming them with data or information is a definite no-no, so the trick is to present just small bits using easy-to-understand visual representation instead.   As such, dashboards are becoming more and more popular in websites as well as applications where they traditionally found themselves.   The term itself is a bit loose.... but we just think of dashboards as a place (usually a home screen) to collate a bunch of useful pieces of information, such as statistics - and present them to the user in digestable bitesize chunks. 

By making use of visual elements, this information can be made to look quite sexy indeed - using graphs, speedometers, pie charts, status toggles and such like. 

There are so many great uses for dashboards such as:

  • Providing financial information such as sales performance, employee performance, revenue share etc.
  • Visitor information such as no of visitors, returning visitors etc
  • Form submissions such as no of submissions, conversion rate etc
  • Health check/status such as showing if criteria has been met, if a system is up/down etc

We're such a fan of dashboards that all our CMS work now comes with a dashboard showing key stats presented with pretty graphs, buttons, icons and status indicators.   Everyone loves it!   We've also built our own reporting suite for our own internal project management system so we can understand and analyse our own business performance with a quick glance.  It's not just for directors & managers though - even regular employees can have their own personal dashboard showing their work queue, task list, performance and much more.

If you're interested in finding out how we can code you a website or application making use of dashboards, please get in touch.