Dashboard

A dashboard is the first screen a person sees after logging in. It has two jobs, and they are worth writing on a wall before anybody designs anything. Say what happened today. Show what is waiting for a decision. The rest of that screen is decoration.

Today's numbers belong at the top, and there should be few of them. Sales since this morning. Bookings for tomorrow. Money owed. How many people are in the building. Under them go the items that need a human choice. An order nobody has packed. A payment that failed twice. Three support messages past the time you promised. A class with no teacher on Sunday. Each one should be a line you can click and finish, not a picture you look at and sigh.

The usual mistake is asking for thirty charts. They get built, they look impressive in the demo, and by the second month nobody opens more than four. The number the manager truly checks every morning is often missing, because nobody asked which number that was. Ask the people who will use the screen what they walk across the office to find out. That answer is the dashboard.

So build it last. A dashboard is a summary, and you cannot summarise a system that does not exist yet. Finish the orders screen, the stock screen and the attendance register, then watch real people use them for a few weeks. Linkysoft leaves this page until the end of a web application project for that reason, and clients who insisted on seeing it first usually rebuilt it later.

One screen is rarely enough. A head teacher, a parent and a teacher want different first pages, and giving all three the same one means two of them stop looking. In Acad, our school and university system, each of those roles lands somewhere different after login.

There is a cost nobody warns you about. A dashboard that recounts every total from the first day on every visit can slow the whole system, especially at nine in the morning when the staff all log in together. Good ones read figures that were counted quietly in the background, overnight or every few minutes. And since most owners check theirs on a phone before they reach the office, Linkysoft builds that phone view inside the same system rather than as a separate mobile app project, showing the three lines that matter instead of a shrunken copy of the desk screen.