Last week, I led a local workshop on designing effective software dashboards with about twenty Sacramento designers. Together, we delved into what users expectations are, how to display information instead of data by using contextual cues and other UI design tips that make dashboards effective. Here's what we discussed about the current state of dashboard design inspiration and how to blend beautiful aesthetics with useful functionality.
Dashboard design is an incredibly common problem for today's digital designer. They're found in most, if not all, software products and offer key insights for the user. Acting as a starting off point, a product's dashboard is responsible for empowering the user to make key decisions and effectively understand what's going on right now.