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.
I second that motion. Go to Fry's, spend $200 on a micro-ATX form factor barebones machine and an LCD screen, mount it to the wall, put ubuntu on it and autostart a browser primed for use with the Google Chart API and meta-refresh.
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.
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.)
We must be twins! I too suffered from a wow addiction for the numbers. I too spent countless hours browsing tabs of adsense, adwords, analytics, affiliates, and merchants! Only thing is, you've one upped me and made a smashup to save time. Thanks for the inspiration. I'm going to try and work on something like this. Small, efficient, and maybe talking to my arduino to display on a lcd!
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.
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.
Three Rings (the guys behind Puzzle Pirates) have something, too.
My favorite feature was hooking it up to loudspeakers and playing a particular sound from their game every time the business made money, with the sound corresponding to how much money they made.
They eventually disabled it, because the constant interruptions were starting to annoy people. This is a nice problem to have.
I remember reading years ago that Amazon had a similar feature in their warehouse in their early days. They also had to turn it off once it became a constant ringing bell!
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…
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.
Given the number of ADA's the Panic guys have, not to mention the Founders Room in their offices, this kind of detail and design flair is completely believable.
$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.
I suppose you can achieve a certain kind of success when you turn every employee's action into an "ROIable" dollar value, but it sure makes for a miserable workplace.
That miserable workplace probably makes the naive assumption that since no client gave the company money, the return on investment must be zero. Working in such a simplistic manner would be enough to make things miserable - even if they didn't put a dollar value on it.
Yea, this really isn't very complex markup or style -- especially considering they only coded it for webkit. It just looks like it would have been a lot of work because it's so slick and polished (typical of Panic).
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.
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"
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,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...