Dashboard

A dashboard is the first screen a person sees after logging in, and it has two jobs worth writing on a wall before anyone designs anything. It should say what happened today and show what is waiting for a decision, so everything else on 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 and how many people are in the building usually do. Under them go the things that need a human choice, such as an order nobody has packed or a payment that failed twice. Three support messages past the promised time belong there, and so does 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, which get built, impress everyone in the demonstration, then sit unopened by the second month. The number the manager truly checks every morning is often missing, because nobody thought to ask which one it was. So ask the people who will use the screen what they cross the office to find out, because that is the dashboard.

That is also why a dashboard is built last, since a summary needs a system that already exists. Finish the orders screen, the stock screen and the attendance register, then watch real people use them for some weeks. Linkysoft leaves this page to the end of a web application project, and clients who insisted on seeing it first usually rebuilt it later.

One screen is rarely enough, since a head teacher, a parent and a teacher each want a different first page. Give all three the same one and two of them stop looking, which is why each role lands somewhere different after login in Acad, our school and university system.

There is a cost nobody warns you about, because a dashboard that recounts every total from day one on every visit can slow the whole system. You feel it at nine in the morning, when the staff log in together, so good ones read figures counted in the background overnight or every few minutes. Most owners check theirs on a phone before they reach the office, so Linkysoft builds that view inside the same system rather than a separate mobile app project. It carries the three lines that matter, not a shrunken copy of the desk screen.