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The Dashboard Was Always a Shield
The Dashboard Was Always a Shield
Most dashboards simply present the data to you, but the best ones go a step further.
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Illustrations
Matija Medved
Author
Rebekah Bek
What Mobbin's study of 2,108 dashboard screens found
1
.
“Dashboard” is the most searched term on Mobbin. 8.9% of all free-text searches. Designers filter for it 3.27× more than any other web pattern in the top ten.
2
.
1 in 5 apps put the dashboard on the home screen. The first thing you see after logging in.
3
.
Five patterns in how the best ones handle the job. The first thing you see. One step ahead. A word that sticks. Answer before they ask. What to leave out.
01
Horse shit
Nearly two hundred years ago, the word "dashboard" meant something you could smell.
Horse-drawn carriages moved fast enough that mud — and whatever fun stuff the horse left on the road — flew forward and hit the passengers. So they built a wooden board across the front of the carriage. A dash-board. Something to block what dashed forward when the horse ran.
The job was simple: take the mess and put a clean surface between you and it.
A shield, essentially.
The form kept changing. The board became a row of gauges in early automobiles. The gauges became a glass screen on a 747. The screen became a rectangle inside a browser tab. The name, though, never changed, because the job never changed either. You're still sitting behind a board that's trying to make sense of what's flying at you.
The video that accompanies this study covers what the best dashboards do. This essay goes deeper on why they work across 536 apps and 2,108 dashboard screens on Mobbin.
02
The most searched term
“Dashboard” is the most searched term on Mobbin. Not onboarding. Not profile. Not even login. Dashboard.
It accounts for 8.9% of all free-text searches, nearly double the next term. On the web pattern filter side, designers filter for "Dashboard" 3.27 times more often than any other pattern in the top ten. Filter & Sort is second at 11%. Dashboard is at 36%.
Share of all free-text searches across Mobbin visitors.
Top 10 most-filtered web patterns on Mobbin (last 3 months). Share of top-10 uses.
Design systems have been built entirely around dashboards, and templates are everywhere. You can generate one from a prompt in seconds. And yet, designers are still searching for a solution.
Curiously, the problem turns out to be two hundred years old.
The modern dashboard has the same job it always did. Take the mess, and put a clean surface between you and it.
Which brings us to: what exactly is a clean surface?
Some designers take "clean" literally and focus on which chart and which layout. Others go deeper into whether to show raw numbers, or explain what they mean. Whether to show everything, or make the executive decision on what the user needs to see.
The second is much harder. And more interesting.
Takeaway
Dashboards might be the hardest UI problem in product design.
03
The first thing you see
What's the first thing you see in a product?
Nearly 1 in 5 apps on Mobbin put the dashboard on the home screen. You log in, and the product immediately tells you what you should care about.
Top 10 most-filtered web patterns on Mobbin (last 3 months). Share of top-10 uses.
Shopify’s Live View puts a globe in your browser. Real-time dots — actual visitors on your store, right now.
Each one is a person who found you and is still browsing your site. The design doesn't give you a session count to interpret. It shows you the world with your customers on it. Mid-campaign, you know in two seconds whether it's working.
Shopify
More
A globe with real-time visitor dots. The design encodes a feeling, not just a metric.
Front, a customer service platform, uses a heatmap where darker squares mean busier hours. You see a full week of support volume, every day and hour compressed into a grid you can scan in three seconds. One glance tells you when your team was overwhelmed and when they weren't.
Front
More
A week of support volume compressed into a heatmap. Darker means busier. You scan it in three seconds.
Navattic, a sales demo software, shows you which companies are watching your interactive demo: Dropbox, PagerDuty, Ramp, Brex — all with visitor counts and time-on-site. The product turns anonymous demo views into named accounts. You log in and see "Dropbox: 8 visitors, 8m 16s" and immediately understand what you bought.
Navattic
More
Named accounts, visitor counts, time-on-site. The dashboard is the proof of purchase.
With all these apps, you log in. And in about four seconds, the product has either made its case or it hasn't.
Takeaway
Does your first screen capture what your product is?
04
One step ahead
You open Fey, the stock portfolio tracker, and see the drop. Before the all-too-familiar rush of anxiety hits, you notice a label at the bottom of the chart: key events, earnings dates, what changed. You breathe a sigh of relief.
Fey
More
Inline annotations surface the "why" before you have to ask.
You've just finished a long run. You're still breathing hard as you check Runna, a personalized training app. It's already packaged your run into a recap: what improved, what to focus on, tips and advice. You haven't decided how to feel about the session yet, but the app is already celebrating you. It feels good.
RUNNA
More
Post-run, the app sequences through what happened: the run detail, an effort rating, a milestone celebration, and a full lap breakdown. The data is all there. The app decides what order you see it in.
Origin, a financial planning app, puts a daily market brief next to your portfolio. The chart shows what happened. The brief tells you what to make of it — again, before you've had time to worry. You don't have to open a second app or spiral into a news site. You nod and close the app.
What Mobbin's study of 2,108 dashboard screens found
1
.
“Dashboard” is the most searched term on Mobbin. 8.9% of all free-text searches. Designers filter for it 3.27× more than any other web pattern in the top ten.
2
.
1 in 5 apps put the dashboard on the home screen. The first thing you see after logging in.
3
.
Five patterns in how the best ones handle the job. The first thing you see. One step ahead. A word that sticks. Answer before they ask. What to leave out.
01
Horse shit
Nearly two hundred years ago, the word "dashboard" meant something you could smell.
Horse-drawn carriages moved fast enough that mud — and whatever fun stuff the horse left on the road — flew forward and hit the passengers. So they built a wooden board across the front of the carriage. A dash-board. Something to block what dashed forward when the horse ran.
The job was simple: take the mess and put a clean surface between you and it.
A shield, essentially.
The form kept changing. The board became a row of gauges in early automobiles. The gauges became a glass screen on a 747. The screen became a rectangle inside a browser tab. The name, though, never changed, because the job never changed either. You're still sitting behind a board that's trying to make sense of what's flying at you.
The video that accompanies this study covers what the best dashboards do. This essay goes deeper on why they work across 536 apps and 2,108 dashboard screens on Mobbin.
02
The most searched term
“Dashboard” is the most searched term on Mobbin. Not onboarding. Not profile. Not even login. Dashboard.
It accounts for 8.9% of all free-text searches, nearly double the next term. On the web pattern filter side, designers filter for "Dashboard" 3.27 times more often than any other pattern in the top ten. Filter & Sort is second at 11%. Dashboard is at 36%.
Share of all free-text searches across Mobbin visitors.
Top 10 most-filtered web patterns on Mobbin (last 3 months). Share of top-10 uses.
Design systems have been built entirely around dashboards, and templates are everywhere. You can generate one from a prompt in seconds. And yet, designers are still searching for a solution.
Curiously, the problem turns out to be two hundred years old.
The modern dashboard has the same job it always did. Take the mess, and put a clean surface between you and it.
Which brings us to: what exactly is a clean surface?
Some designers take "clean" literally and focus on which chart and which layout. Others go deeper into whether to show raw numbers, or explain what they mean. Whether to show everything, or make the executive decision on what the user needs to see.
The second is much harder. And more interesting.
Takeaway
Dashboards might be the hardest UI problem in product design.
03
The first thing you see
What's the first thing you see in a product?
Nearly 1 in 5 apps on Mobbin put the dashboard on the home screen. You log in, and the product immediately tells you what you should care about.
Top 10 most-filtered web patterns on Mobbin (last 3 months). Share of top-10 uses.
Shopify’s Live View puts a globe in your browser. Real-time dots — actual visitors on your store, right now.
Each one is a person who found you and is still browsing your site. The design doesn't give you a session count to interpret. It shows you the world with your customers on it. Mid-campaign, you know in two seconds whether it's working.
Shopify
More
A globe with real-time visitor dots. The design encodes a feeling, not just a metric.
Front, a customer service platform, uses a heatmap where darker squares mean busier hours. You see a full week of support volume, every day and hour compressed into a grid you can scan in three seconds. One glance tells you when your team was overwhelmed and when they weren't.
Front
More
A week of support volume compressed into a heatmap. Darker means busier. You scan it in three seconds.
Navattic, a sales demo software, shows you which companies are watching your interactive demo: Dropbox, PagerDuty, Ramp, Brex — all with visitor counts and time-on-site. The product turns anonymous demo views into named accounts. You log in and see "Dropbox: 8 visitors, 8m 16s" and immediately understand what you bought.
Navattic
More
Named accounts, visitor counts, time-on-site. The dashboard is the proof of purchase.
With all these apps, you log in. And in about four seconds, the product has either made its case or it hasn't.
Takeaway
Does your first screen capture what your product is?
04
One step ahead
You open Fey, the stock portfolio tracker, and see the drop. Before the all-too-familiar rush of anxiety hits, you notice a label at the bottom of the chart: key events, earnings dates, what changed. You breathe a sigh of relief.
Fey
More
Inline annotations surface the "why" before you have to ask.
You've just finished a long run. You're still breathing hard as you check Runna, a personalized training app. It's already packaged your run into a recap: what improved, what to focus on, tips and advice. You haven't decided how to feel about the session yet, but the app is already celebrating you. It feels good.
RUNNA
More
Post-run, the app sequences through what happened: the run detail, an effort rating, a milestone celebration, and a full lap breakdown. The data is all there. The app decides what order you see it in.
Origin, a financial planning app, puts a daily market brief next to your portfolio. The chart shows what happened. The brief tells you what to make of it — again, before you've had time to worry. You don't have to open a second app or spiral into a news site. You nod and close the app.
What Mobbin's study of 2,108 dashboard screens found
1
.
“Dashboard” is the most searched term on Mobbin. 8.9% of all free-text searches. Designers filter for it 3.27× more than any other web pattern in the top ten.
2
.
1 in 5 apps put the dashboard on the home screen. The first thing you see after logging in.
3
.
Five patterns in how the best ones handle the job. The first thing you see. One step ahead. A word that sticks. Answer before they ask. What to leave out.
01
Horse shit
Nearly two hundred years ago, the word "dashboard" meant something you could smell.
Horse-drawn carriages moved fast enough that mud — and whatever fun stuff the horse left on the road — flew forward and hit the passengers. So they built a wooden board across the front of the carriage. A dash-board. Something to block what dashed forward when the horse ran.
The job was simple: take the mess and put a clean surface between you and it.
A shield, essentially.
The form kept changing. The board became a row of gauges in early automobiles. The gauges became a glass screen on a 747. The screen became a rectangle inside a browser tab. The name, though, never changed, because the job never changed either. You're still sitting behind a board that's trying to make sense of what's flying at you.
The video that accompanies this study covers what the best dashboards do. This essay goes deeper on why they work across 536 apps and 2,108 dashboard screens on Mobbin.
02
The most searched term
“Dashboard” is the most searched term on Mobbin. Not onboarding. Not profile. Not even login. Dashboard.
It accounts for 8.9% of all free-text searches, nearly double the next term. On the web pattern filter side, designers filter for "Dashboard" 3.27 times more often than any other pattern in the top ten. Filter & Sort is second at 11%. Dashboard is at 36%.
Share of all free-text searches across Mobbin visitors.
Top 10 most-filtered web patterns on Mobbin (last 3 months). Share of top-10 uses.
Design systems have been built entirely around dashboards, and templates are everywhere. You can generate one from a prompt in seconds. And yet, designers are still searching for a solution.
Curiously, the problem turns out to be two hundred years old.
The modern dashboard has the same job it always did. Take the mess, and put a clean surface between you and it.
Which brings us to: what exactly is a clean surface?
Some designers take "clean" literally and focus on which chart and which layout. Others go deeper into whether to show raw numbers, or explain what they mean. Whether to show everything, or make the executive decision on what the user needs to see.
The second is much harder. And more interesting.
Takeaway
Dashboards might be the hardest UI problem in product design.
03
The first thing you see
What's the first thing you see in a product?
Nearly 1 in 5 apps on Mobbin put the dashboard on the home screen. You log in, and the product immediately tells you what you should care about.
Top 10 most-filtered web patterns on Mobbin (last 3 months). Share of top-10 uses.
Shopify’s Live View puts a globe in your browser. Real-time dots — actual visitors on your store, right now.
Each one is a person who found you and is still browsing your site. The design doesn't give you a session count to interpret. It shows you the world with your customers on it. Mid-campaign, you know in two seconds whether it's working.
Shopify
More
A globe with real-time visitor dots. The design encodes a feeling, not just a metric.
Front, a customer service platform, uses a heatmap where darker squares mean busier hours. You see a full week of support volume, every day and hour compressed into a grid you can scan in three seconds. One glance tells you when your team was overwhelmed and when they weren't.
Front
More
A week of support volume compressed into a heatmap. Darker means busier. You scan it in three seconds.
Navattic, a sales demo software, shows you which companies are watching your interactive demo: Dropbox, PagerDuty, Ramp, Brex — all with visitor counts and time-on-site. The product turns anonymous demo views into named accounts. You log in and see "Dropbox: 8 visitors, 8m 16s" and immediately understand what you bought.
Navattic
More
Named accounts, visitor counts, time-on-site. The dashboard is the proof of purchase.
With all these apps, you log in. And in about four seconds, the product has either made its case or it hasn't.
Takeaway
Does your first screen capture what your product is?
04
One step ahead
You open Fey, the stock portfolio tracker, and see the drop. Before the all-too-familiar rush of anxiety hits, you notice a label at the bottom of the chart: key events, earnings dates, what changed. You breathe a sigh of relief.
Fey
More
Inline annotations surface the "why" before you have to ask.
You've just finished a long run. You're still breathing hard as you check Runna, a personalized training app. It's already packaged your run into a recap: what improved, what to focus on, tips and advice. You haven't decided how to feel about the session yet, but the app is already celebrating you. It feels good.
RUNNA
More
Post-run, the app sequences through what happened: the run detail, an effort rating, a milestone celebration, and a full lap breakdown. The data is all there. The app decides what order you see it in.
Origin, a financial planning app, puts a daily market brief next to your portfolio. The chart shows what happened. The brief tells you what to make of it — again, before you've had time to worry. You don't have to open a second app or spiral into a news site. You nod and close the app.