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Dashboard and admin panel design

One of my favorite things to design are admins and dashboards. I don’t know why, I suspect because everything has a focus on making data the superstar. Also, I hate reading large chunks of text to figure out the functions of things on websites. 

Here are the most common problems I notice with the Admin pages that act as Dashboards:

• The information does not support meaning or use. The user is expected to make a connection that items are like when they are not grouped together in menus or as pages. Likewise, there’s a problem that happens where things just get “put” onto a page. “We need to show everything” and “we need to show as little as possible” clash like titans, especially when you have design by committee. 

• Consistency is a huge factor. Design and consistency should go hand in hand. Where I’ve made mistakes in the past are letting clients break that to adhere to non-established design patterns. Instead, the client prefers for some piece of the dashboard to adhere only to what makes sense for them. They do not understand that their audience is larger than a party of one, family, or friends.

• Creating visually compelling dashboards: It has to be said that making data pleasing to the eye, quickly scannable, easily intuited and interpreted is a pretty hard job. But if you’re an interface designer, it’s your job.  

Design can’t become a distraction from the data. Instead of integrating fully, in the hands of many designers, the two pieces struggle with a tug of war that just about every user can feel even if they can’t articulate. This is especially true when people use  zebra tables (alternating backgrounds) in colors that are too hue/saturation heavy.

Removing the unnecessary

I live by removing the unnecessary so the necessary can speak. The next time you find yourself getting bogged down with ornamentation and decorating try this handy exercise.

• Picture yourself as a typical user, ask what the most important things you should be paying attention to are.

• Create a list from 1-7 as a starting point and visually rank the importance of every element on the page that is data.

• Through a series of questions you can get at what a user might want. Do this 2 or 3 times imagining yourself as different personas.

• Remember your goal is an easily readable and intuited system that is elegant. A visual display that allows data to speak to the user and for them to fully understand what they are seeing.  

One of my favorite admin designs from a purely aesthetic view: Mint.com.