

The Panic Status Board - adamhowell
http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/03/the-panic-status-board/

======
patio11
You should have an internal dashboard, even if you're not absurdly artsy Mac
developers who can afford a flatscreen monitor to showcase it to anybody in
the office. You can have v1.0 ground out in an hour or two -- take your MVC
framework of choice, make a single page behind authentication, set that as
your homepage or etc -- and it will pay dividends for the rest of your
business' life.

It is absolutely absurd how much extra value-producing work you'll get done if
tasks which routinely take you 10 minutes take 5 minutes and tasks which
routinely take you 2 minutes just don't happen.

If you need some inspiration on what to put on it, I have an article on the
topic somewhere... Here we go. [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/02/09/dashboard-
design-for-met...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/02/09/dashboard-design-for-
metrics-savvy-software-companies/)

~~~
notauser
I generally prefer to get my reports by e-mail because I already have a
filtering system in place for critical/urgent/useful/noise. It stops me
sitting there hitting refresh on a web page to check my stats every 45
seconds.

If you are using Django you can get your daily/hourly reports that way pretty
easily - set up a cron job to call something based on this...

#!/usr/bin/python

from django.core.management import setup_environ

from datasvcs import settings

setup_environ(settings)

from django.core.mail import send_mail

from django.contrib.auth.models import User,Group

from yourapp import models

# Do model query magic here - compile report as a string.

send_mail('Daily report',report-
text,'reports@domain.com',['reportdestination1@domain.com'])

~~~
patio11
_It stops me sitting there hitting refresh on a web page to check my stats
every 45 seconds._

Smart man. Aside from customer support information, everything on my dashboard
is cached for 24 hours. I do this specifically because I used to waste far,
far too much time sitting on Google Analytics mashing refresh. Mashing refresh
on the dashboard just shows me the same thing I saw that morning. (I have a
URL available which forcibly purges the cache, but it requires me to type in
something like i-have-nothing-more-important-to-do-than-this in my URL bar. I
think I've used it maybe twice.)

------
SandB0x
Panic's blog is just so beautifully designed. Scroll down to the comment form.

~~~
aw3c2
And scrolling very slow in Opera (linux&nvidia), probably thanks to CSS
transparency overload and/or very thin gradient images.

~~~
yread
10.50 on windows no slow down here

------
markbnine
I like the idea of having a big number to represent your "score."

Once I was on a team using Flyspray and one of our developers hacked it to
display a real-time score. He had some convoluted algorithm that took into
account percent completed, criticals, and priority. Everybody started working
the number, trying to get it higher. It was great and become quite
competitive. We'd even talk about our score with marketing and clients. The
only problem followed a beta test when the client opened a ton of fixes. The
number sank like stone. Not a big problem though. The developer tweaked his
algorithm and bingo. . . our score was soon back where it belonged.

~~~
Sukotto
If I understand that correctly: your score dropped, so you hacked the scoring
algorithm to display a number you liked better?

Shouldn't you have instead started a new round of the "game" and worked to fix
the bugs -- thus improving your score legitimately?

~~~
markbnine
Yeah, you're right. And the number lost some of its luster after the hack.
Eventually we stopped using it. So lesson learned. Don't undermine your own
tracking system.

We had two problems. One, the developer who wrote the algorithm was the sort
of guy who needed to constantly tweak the system. He was a great coder, but he
also couldn't produce unless he played a few tricks or hid an easter eggs. So,
he kept screwing with the score, making it blink red or suddenly drop and
return to normal. We joked that he needed to sell his algorithm to Google. It
was fun, but doomed.

The second problem was that marketing started taking the number seriously.
They love the numbers, don't they? We were a web shop and at constant war over
real estate and advertising. The unwritten law was, anything that marketing
took seriously, needed to be screwed with.

------
tyweir
Last.fm has (or had) something similar and quite sexy as well:
<http://blog.last.fm/2008/08/01/quality-control>

~~~
brown9-2
Their idea of hooking up an analog meter to measure the average website
response time is really nice.

~~~
russss
Those are my gauges (although I no longer work for last.fm) - the code and
design notes for them are up on Github:

<http://github.com/russss/arduino-gauges>

I also helped out with the analogue tweet-o-meter from a couple of weeks ago:

<http://vimeo.com/9352631>

~~~
brown9-2
thanks for sharing the code!

------
eelco
Nice attention to detail: note how the censored text is pixelated _in
perspective_ ;)

~~~
Timothee
Good eye!

I have to say that I'm slightly confused by this picture. On one hand, the
post, the pixelation of the numbers and the support guy story make it sound
like it's a real picture, but there's definitely something off, no? It looks
like a mock-up to me, but I can't decide if it's just a clean design on a nice
display…

~~~
somebear
Knowing the Panic guys I am sure it's real. With the attention to detail Cabel
usually has, I'm sure he spend the time to make the photo look exactly like he
wanted it to: perfect.

------
smackfu
That is a $2500 monitor. If you were wondering.

~~~
patio11
$2,500 for the machine, $7,500 for the fully loaded cost of the developer who
spent three weeks getting the CSS exactly right. (Ahh, Mac developers. "The
world needs all kinds.")

Still, even at $10k it is absurdly cheap relative to the value generated.

~~~
rimantas

      spent three weeks getting the CSS exactly right
    

two days tops.

~~~
generalk
Sure, but that's the difference between you and Panic.

You'd probably knock something very similar to that out in two days, probably
that functionally served the same purpose.

Panic and Co. would rather spend a LOT more time on it to make it beautiful
and captivating to look at, then spend a chunk of change on a fantastic
monitor to display it on.

This is why people pay for Panic apps.

~~~
rimantas
I am sure you don't know neither how I work nor how does Panic. And under
"getting the CSS exactly" right I understand slightly different things from
"getting the design right"

------
spencerfry
We made an internal one early January, 2010.

Here's a mockup of it:

<http://www.massiveblue.com/clients/carbonmade/pulse/>

Note: The figures are bogus.

~~~
Hates_
The "Management Information" pull down is a brilliant touch. Not something I
had ever considered as a UI element.

~~~
spencerfry
We have it set up so only the three founders can see that tab.

------
pstinnett
The guys at Robocat (developed Outside for the iPhone) have a similar tool for
tracking sales. They developed an internal only iPhone app that you shake to
update the total sales of Outside - clever play on Shake your money maker.

I'm always interested to get glimpses into these internal status pages / apps,

------
bouncingsoul
In a similar vein but meant to be public: <http://culturedcode.com/status/>

~~~
joshwa
The big "statuses" are inconsistent (and therefore useless) compared to the
actual status in the details. This means I have to actually read the details
since I can't get any useful info just from scanning the page.

------
cmelbye
Eston Bond did something similar with the dashboard for this home automation
system called Sarai: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/eston/3805310805/>

Very nice all in one interface with time, appointments, news, and weather. I
really like this idea...

------
kreneskyp
The Open Source Lab has been working on the 2nd revision of our dashboard
software that we use within our network operations center, and outside our
server room.

<http://trac.osuosl.org/touchscreen>

------
lallysingh
The bigco I work for has three monitors showing primary sales and login
numbers in real time. In the scale of thousands of employees, the simple
metrics serve to keep a basic level of group connectivity to the top-level
objectives.

------
benologist
This is really interesting. I'm about 1 month into my public beta now and I
find myself constantly remoting into my servers and manually checking if
everything still works. Already it's a notable drain on my productivity.

------
bmalicoat
I love everything about this. The bus times, the little icons of every
employee but especially the ticker of twitter updates about Panic. Definitely
inspiring for the developers.

~~~
somebear
The twitter updates are cool, although I can see why they chose vertical
orientation for the screen, I think the twitter part would have worked better
in horizontal orientation (without seeing it in person, so I'm probably
talking out my ass).

What I really like about the developer icons, is that even in an image that
size, I can still see quite quickly who is on what projects. Very cool indeed.

The thing, however, that I really love, is the simplicity.

