Designing a Dashboard
Published: 7/17/2020
This post was originally written back in 2020. A lot of my thoughts and ideas have changed since then, but I've brought this back to see where I've come.
Overview:
This company generates websites for restaurants using an algorithm that will best match the theme and tone that the restaurant embodies. The next step for them was to develop a customer dashboard so the restaurant owner could go in and edit the content of their site.
Problem:
I needed to come up with a solution that organized the modular aspects of our website generator in a cohesive way where a restaurant owner could easily make changes to their site after the handoff. Big picture, it’s a fairly complex dashboard that in its end goal can handle everything from features, content, menu updates, to even SEO. However, my main task was to come up with a foundation that would allow the developers to make a V0 of just the most basic functionalities, but also have an easy way to incorporate more features as the company expands.
Solution:
With all dashboard designs, my main focus was first on information architecture. The developers and I came up with 3 general categories that revolved around branding, content, and business. The idea is that from the left side you can drop down and see sub categories and click on the item that you are looking to change.
When you click a category, a tabbed menu comes up that would be filed with the different editable content. This just helps with more organization and easy access to switch between content.
Takeaways:
This was one of my first projects as a UI/UX designer and it proved to be super complex when we added all of the uncertainties of a generated website. We can’t assume which features will be on the website, but we have to give the option to include everything and visualize what that would look like. This made for a lot of categories and a hard time figuring out a great information architecture. At the end of the day, a dashboard is an easy concept, but it’s how information is organized that will make or break the experience.