Shiny new Dashboard

by Wes Hooper

18th June 2010

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Published in: Updates

We've long wanted to give the Moobiz dashboard a tidy up - make the existing information on there simpler and less cluttered. At the same time, a common request has been to display your To-do's on there which we wanted to get done.

Lastly, we'd started playing around with a 'Twitter-like' stream of activity for your Moobiz account earlier in the year but couldn't find the right balance between being useful and causing information overload!

So, we started off with the old dashboard, looking something like:

 

After a bit of discussion and sketching, we realised the dashboard needs to do 3 things:

1. Show you quickly how you're doing (finances, stats, etc.)
2. Let you know what you need to focus on (problems and tasks)
3. Keep up to date with activity (other staff, web visitors, etc.)

So, we simplified the space into three areas:

 

 

And then juggled around the existing information, putting the Ledger summary and the numbers / stats together. We lost a few of the stats that didn't really add anything and tried shrinking the charts. We also added your personal To-dos:

 

 

Better, but the charts don't actually help at all, so we got rid of them and gave the figures more weight. Too much perhaps!

We also think we've figured out the 'Business Activity' stream idea. Our trial from before included things like 'New project added', 'Note added to Mr X.' and so on, which, unless you were really busy just seemed to list things for too long - it might be telling you something that happened last week for example.

Putting the Activity stream on the dashboard also gave the feeling of 'too much information' when sat alongside the existing list of recent web site visitors.

We then realised that list of web visitors was itself getting messy with numerous icons and extra words when a visitor left feedback, purchased something and so on. So we merged the two together:

 

That gives you a single Activity stream for your business, web visitors, orders, new projects, everything. Just like Twitter, the idea isn't to read it all - a quick glance shows you what's been going on recently, but you can browse back further if you want to.

We hope you like the update - we'll be further enhancing it and streamlining over the next week or two. For example, we're already a good way through re-organising the Alerts, Calendar and To-do's in the center of the page into a single list which we'll make the focus of the dashboard. The Status and Activity sections will also be getting a little more polish!