

Ask HN: How to Build a Dashboard for your business - gdilla

I sometimes see in articles about Square or Facebook the mention of a custom dashboard usually presented on some big flatscreen in a common area of company-specific metrics. Like for square it might be a live transaction count, along with a daily and cummulative dollars processed (for example), among other things.<p>My question for HN - how many of your companies, either startups, your own thing, or established firms have these kind of dashboards, and:<p>1) How transparent is it? Is it in a common area where all your employees can see it? And if so, do you hide some things or does the cleaning lady see everything the CEO sees?<p>2) Do you have any advice or best practices for creating such dashboards? What technology did you use to hack it together, or is it a collection of third party tools you are some how parsing, like Google Analytics and Flurry, etc.<p>I'm in a big old company, and I'd like to establish a dashboard for us that's transparent and covers our website and app performance. I'd like this data to help us be better at carving out strategy and promote ideas from all employees. I feel like things are so siloed and mysterious.<p>I'll take any advice I can get. Cheers.
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dmarinoc
(Disclaimer: I'm a proud founder at <http://ducksboard.com>)

1) It's pretty transparent because we're a small team (of 3) :) We have a
large 37' screen with general information (leads, support tickets, milestones,
active users...) and also all of us are using it individually for tracking
other metrics (f.i. I'm tracking mainly marketing metrics, while Jan is an
addict to PostgreSQL performance).

2) We have a set of predefined widgets, but we mainly push data through a REST
API. It's so easy to set up, that even a VC can do it :P

Next week we'll open up the invites floodgates (a.k.a. "public beta"). If you
want to try it, please sign up for an account in our site and then sent me an
email (diego_at_ducksboard.com) saying that you read this comment on HN.
There's a priority line for HN users :)

~~~
gdilla
sounds amazing. Will do.

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joshuacc
In reverse order.

2) Using something like Geckoboard would probably be helpful.
<http://www.geckoboard.com/>

1) The ones I've seen (not in person) are for the purpose of informing the
entire team about company/project status at a glance. Presumably when everyone
sees the stats, optimizing for them is much more top of mind.

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sunspeck
Some notes on dashboard design and implementation from Panic:
<http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/03/the-panic-status-board/>

