2.0 Dashboard
Posted: April 16th, 2009 | Author: Leisa Reichelt | Filed under: 2.0 Dashboard | Tags: d7ux_2_0 | 34 Comments »Dashboard
Description: A dashboard shown as an overlay as first view from log in and when ‘Dashboard’ selected from header. Larger image available .
Comprises a selection of ‘widgets’ which can be switched on and off and rearranged on the screen.
Purpose is to create an ‘overview’ of the site status. Expected dashboard widgets would include:
- New Comments
- New Trackbacks/Links
- Traffic
- WatchDog data
- Broken Links
- Draft content
- more
It is proposed that design and development of widgets for the dashboard can be undertaken as microprojects, for anyone interested in participating.
Current thinking/roadmap:
- Development of a widget library that can accept contributions
- Possibilities for integration with d.o dashboard (pending launch of redesign)
Please feel free to add your thoughts as comments below or if you’d rather publish them elsewhere you can have them the pipe by using this tag #d7ux_2_0
go back to Project Framework to view all project components
Related:
- Widgets for Dashboard (#d7ux_2_1)
[...] Header (#d7ux_1_0) 2.0 Dashboard (#d7ux_2_0) (includes widgets for dashboard) 3.0 My Profile (#d7ux_3_0) 4.0 Content (#d7ux_4_0) [...]
Crosspost of a recent attempt at a dashboard:
Hm. Not sure about the dashboard being in a pop-up. We could make much better use of horizontal space if it was on its own page. OTOH, it could also be jarring to have other items go in a pop-up and this one not, but “Edit” is already going to do something different, so maybe this is not a big deal.
This!
“Possibilities for integration with d.0 dashboard (pending launch of redesign)”
Is very, very yummy.
My comment is being marked spam… so here goes my attempt at making the link to content ratio higher so that the list of links below can make it into the comment que.
Other Drupal Dashboard posts…
- by markpeak
- by Brandonian
- (by dmitrig01)
Hope that helps…
Josh
Gotta disagree with webchick here. This isn’t the type of dashboard that we’re used to (i.e., a collection of admin links). This is more of a status overview page which I don’t think would really ever get used if it weren’t in a popup.
The site builders will probably turn it off for themselves so that’s not an issue. BUT it could be very useful information to the site’s users (i.e., maintainers), and probably information that they would not see otherwise (how many clients do you know that would go out of their way to check on stuff like that? Most of them wouldn’t even remember that it’s there). So I think a popup is a nice solution, provided that it’s easy to turn off forever.
That being said, I’m not sure if something like this could ever really replace a system like Google Analytics, which is what it’s attempting to do…so if it’s there, I vote for an overlay, but really, it might not need to be there at all.
The overlay popup dashboard is an excellent idea, and is currently in use in several spendy, proprietary CMSes. Several attractive widget options I’ve seen in some others include:
- broken links
- expiring content or content I’ve marked “refresh in x days”
- unpublished content (work in progress)
- notifications
- (my) shortcuts
- work requests
A user can have more than one role. How to switch between the roles?
I think a user with multiple roles would customise and save their dashboard widgets to suit their individual needs, so that ‘switching’ wouldn’t be necessary. We’d have to come up with a rule for what the default would be in this case though.
Well, if you take a look at WordPress’s dashboard, for instance:
They are able to do quite a lot here because they have the entire width of the browser to play with.
If we can only ever fit 4 blocks in a 2×2 row, it’s going to get challenging to escalate everything that a given role might need to see.
Incidentally, that’s lyricnz’s skitch, it was just conveniently mentioned in IRC so I sniped it.
Just one question — is the dashboard overly going to look the same as any of the other items? Or is this overlay style going to be unique?
Just to inspire:
My main concern with the dashboard as a popup or not is avoiding the “Where’d my content go?” problem that new users seem to run into. As a popup, you can still see your content behind it, so it’s obvious that closing the dashboard returns you to the page. If the dashboard is a new page, a nice “Return to Content” link at the top should take care of it.
re: wordpress. I use their dashboard regularly and have pruned down a lot of the stuff so that it is more usable for me on a day to day basis. I think there are 8 items on their dashboard and I have about 5 showing. One of the reasons we’re taking the ‘overlay’ approach is that the abstraction from the site/content you’re working on that you get with an admin system (for which this WP dashboard is the landing page) is not really a very positive thing. On the whole, we’ve found that people would prefer as much as possible to stay ‘in the context’ of the site they’re working on.
Don’t take the wireframe showing the 2×2 grid too seriously at this point. There’s still a lot of designing that needs to happen before we get a real sense of how much ‘stuff’ could happily live in this overlay… my gut feeling is that the overlay can hold enough.
ooh, look at that, this has ‘pages’. Wonder what pages mean in this context?
thanks for the link!
this is a great starting point, thanks Carolyn.
for reference, the current WP dashboard has:
- Right Now (a summary of stats re: no. of posts, comments etc.)
- Recent Comments (that you can approve/spam/edit/reply to inline)
- Incoming Links (trackbacks)
- Plugins (new, most popular etc.)
- QuickPress (a form to publish content quickly)
- Recent Drafts (content WIP)
- WordPress Development Blog
- Other WordPress
you can switch any of these on or off and drag them around the page to suit your needs.
Why pop-up anything in the admin section? Keep it as simple as possible and avoid spending any effort on cheap and annoying tricks like that – they should live in contrib while core should focus on actually having the functionality.
Customizable and rearrangable, etc would be great, but before that even becomes very helpful we also need to settle on a way to replicate configs, share configs, or pre-configure things broadly in Drupal core. It would be much more helpful in terms of finding a fit for an admin style to be able to quickly try a few popular layouts available from d.o then spending hours of trial and error.
Agree with webchick. I just don’t see a reason for the dashboard to be a pop-up. I get how Add/Edit/Find should be pop-ups as they all relate to the process of manipulating information on the site…a pop-up retains a view into the site’s context that will help users w/the task at hand. That doesn’t seem to apply to the dashboard.
To make a poor analogy, in a car, a dashboard makes sense as something you can quickly glance at (e.g. a pop up) because you may make micro changes to your current context (driving) by slowing down, speeding up, etc. That also applies to edit/add/find content in a CMS. But for a CMS, would you really make any micro changes to the content of the site based on what you see in the website’s dashboard? It doesn’t seem like anything in the WP dashboard list that was posted earlier (moderating comments, investigating plug-ins, reading other blogs, recent drafts, incoming links) is related to the page at hand or even content creation. It is related to decision and analysis on the overall site. Also the dashboard seems to require a full page since 1) the dashboard presents options that are not single quick tasks or 2) it contains links that go elsewhere. Shouldn’t pop-ups be reserved for small tasks that can be resolved w/o leaving the pop up?
In short, I’d move the dashboard off the bottom menu (which seems to implies pop ups) and put it on the top menu.
Interestingly, I believe dashboards are slowly becoming like “home”. A thing that is looked at for 5 seconds, because it has only rather useless statistics that convey small meaning to how well your site is doing.
For example, how much time do you really spend on your WordPress Dashboard, for me only a second before I turn to posts or add a post . WordPress dashboard is customizable, but imagine the effort required to customize that.
I myself spend a lot of time designing dashboards, the angle I always took to look at its contents before I even pitched the “possibility” because solely the possibility is rather meaningless – unless their is clear consensus that certain metrics or tasks can be addressed by a dashboard.
“one (technical) solution i see is when everything in Drupal output is in renderable array and is going through drupal_render() to generate UI elements, those array elements could have a property something like #importance or #visual_weight – it is just a number 0 1 2 etc. So on rendering this is taken into account and elements with higher importance are rendered “bigger and fatter””
please read for a short IRC log on this subject.
If you look at usability aspects of the current Drupal 6x platform, it’s like a bowl of spaghetti…sure it’s powerful and fluid, but that doesn’t make it easy to use. Looking at what WordPress and Joomla are doing you can see why these platforms have a higher adoption rate…they are easier to grasp for most webmasters and content creators. Whatever you do, just keep in the mind the usability aspects without getting too fancy.
Inspired on I created a small module to cover the 4 most usual administration tasks by a non-administrator:
1. Track Content
2. Administer Comments
3. Create content
4. Administer Users
The module is a first dev version I’m gonna start working on new features and making it easier, some cool things about the module are (I think they’re cool
1. Use of popups to Create Content
2. Consolidated UI for users with no experience in drupal, everything it’s on one place.
3. Customisable help messages everywhere.
4. Uses the same pages drupal provides for comments and users but with help messages and on a single UI.
5. Although you can’t add a view with the configuration settings (not yet), you can do it adding minimal code, I think this it’s also cool because it opens the possible uses of this module to more cases than I can think of.
7. It’s possible to hide the comments and the descriptions when adding new content.
This is my first module and I did it on a weekend, I’m expecting to change some things and to add some functionality, I just wanted to share the module with the community to get some feedback and because I’m using it on several production sites and it’s making my clients happier and my life easier.
The project it’s at .
Inspired in part by , I created a small module to cover the 4 most usual administration tasks by a non-administrator:
1. Track Content
2. Administer Comments
3. Create content
4. Administer Users
The module is a first dev version I’m gonna start working on new features and making it easier, some cool things about the module are (I think they’re cool
1. Use of popups to Create Content
2. Consolidated UI for users with no experience in drupal, everything it’s on one place.
3. Customisable help messages everywhere.
4. Uses the same pages drupal provides for comments and users but with help messages and on a single UI.
5. Although you can’t add a view with the configuration settings (not yet), you can do it adding minimal code, I think this it’s also cool because it opens the possible uses of this module to more cases than I can think of.
6. It’s possible to hide the comments and the descriptions when adding new content.
This is my first module and I did it on a weekend, I’m expecting to change some things and to add some functionality, I just wanted to share the module with the community to get some feedback and because I’m using it on several production sites and it’s making my clients happier and my life easier.
The project it’s at .
as far as i understand it, the need for a dashboard comes up because non-technical users will be adding content.
how is this currently being handled with larger installations of drupal where editorial teams are working on the content?
has there been any further discussion with the all of a sudden secretive guys of lullabot?
the idea of the dashboard is to improve the overall user experience of Drupal for a range of end users, including the less technical among us
It’s purpose is to give an overview of the system activity and shortcut to most likely ‘next actions’ – this is going to vary from role to role, so a Site Administrator’s dashboard will look quite different to a Content Creator’s dashboard (they’re interested in monitoring different things within the system and often have different sets of core tasks).
I think the dashboard really comes into its own for larger editorial teams – helps the management of a larger set of content as it moves through (possibly) more complex workflows. We’ll be testing what we’re designing with a few large teams here in London (who have helped contribute requirements already), and I’d love if others can get it in front of more of these types of companies as soon as we have something more concrete to show.
We’ve been talking with the Lullabot design team – so far it’s been pretty high level but we’re hoping to talk with them more about specific design issues we’re tackling to see what their experience was as we move forwards.
Do let me know if there’s anything in particular you’re interested in
This begs the question, should be we have support for modals in core? Seems a bit short sighted to implement a popup/modal for one screen, when many modules could take advantage of this if it were in core, Panels for one. Think of block or theme configs with AJAX automagically updating the display. Cool.
Jeff,
There’s a patch for D7 to put modal window support into core. See
Cool. I’ll be taking a look at that!
Exceptional idea. Having a modular, widget-centric dashboard would be just what the dr. ordered.
Things like: broken links, new comments, traffic, downloads, popular content, new forum topics, etc.
It would be neat to be able to use Views to power some of the widgets – Views could create all kinds of different lists of things to put in a dashboard.
If we’d create a region for the dashboard, we can add blocks. If we can add blocks, we can use views to add blocks to our dashboard.
minor updates to description of the dashboard above and noting that development of widgets for the dashboard have been suggested as activities that you can help us with via http://www.d7ux.org/microprojects/
Very pleasantly surprised to see the work that’s gone in so far to make the Drupal experience friendlier for non-developer users. Certainly will assist when delivering sites for clients (I believe we’re in our fourth revision of a Drupal manual that we print and bind for each client).
As soon as I saw dashboard I immediately thought of GoodBarry’s attempt at it (see ). It might have some useful ideas that can be adapted to this initiative (WordPress’ dashboard was never inspiring).
To weigh in on the pop up vs dedicate page debate… I think the worth of having it on a dedicated page comes from the feeling that more widgets could be contained within it. I don’t really see a problem with the overlay version if the pop up shapes around the number of widgets that have been added to it and works comfortably if it’s longer than the screen height (so scrolling is still possible and intuitive).
I built a dashboard like this for D6, I’d love to get feedback from you guys as to what else you want to see on it.
updated to show proposed design approach