The right dashboard UI design for your website’s admin dashboard should reveal the most necessary data accurately at a glance of an eye. By picking a suitable one, you’re enabling yourself to make decisions faster, thus taking the suitable measures at the proper time.
As you proceed to read through this blog post, you’re going to learn what a good admin dashboard design looks like, and you’ll also start building a picture of how yours would be. So, let’s get started!
The Five Steps to Choose the Right Dashboard Design
for Your Website’s Admin Dashboard
- Define the Purpose(s) of the Dashboard
- Define the Data Representations You Need
- Choose a Layout Design
- Make Sure You Can Access All Necessary Pages From One Place
- Make Sure It’s Customizable
1 - Define the Purpose(s) of the Dashboard
The choice range will be massively narrowed by defining what exactly you need your dashboard for. Well, obviously you need a website dashboard, but do you need it to impart critical information in real-time, or do you need it to extract analytical data that’s been stockpiled over a specific period of time?
In other words, does your business require adapting to market changes quickly and/or on a daily basis, or does it follow a long-term strategy?
Usually, trading, forex advisory, e-commerce, and drop shipping sites need to respond to market changes and seasons quickly. If you’re operating in a niche that needs continuous adaptation to change, we recommend you use an Operational Dashboard.
An operational dashboard is an information dashboard designed to help users monitor real-time data against KPIs and metrics. Such a dashboard responds quickly -even per minute- to changes.
However, if you’re building a blog or trying to brand a business online, it’s more practical to use a dashboard UI design that concludes months of data in a scannable chart. This type of dashboard is called an analytical dashboard.
An analytical dashboard enables you to make decisions based on long-term collected info and helps set strategies and monitor their implementations.
2 - Define the Data Representations You Need
There are many ways to represent data in a chart. It can be represented in a donut-like chart, a pie, columns, circular area, over-time line, bar chart… etc. While each data representation has its pros and cons, we recommend you stick to an over-time line data chart for your website’s traffic, a pie for conversion and traffic sources, and columns for web page performance.
Feel free to customize and personalize the other metrics based on how you wish for them to be as long as they serve you well. And to help you choose, you can rely on the following questions:
- How many data variables will be displayed in a single chart?
- How many data points will be displayed for each variable?
- Will they be displayed over time, category, group, or any other categorization method?
By answering these questions, you’re more likely to make the right decisions when choosing the data charts for your dashboard UI design. But honestly, you’d always want to make some changes and adjustments to your dashboard no matter how perfect it looks! That’s why we’ll talk about the importance of choosing a customizable dashboard in the fifth step.
3 - Choose a Layout Design
Your dashboard UI design should be straightforward and efficient at the same time. A grid layout is simply the best and most common way to organize the blocks of your dashboard. But when visualizing a good one, you may want to keep in mind some rules and facts from this section.
So, because we read and write from left to right, it’s usually the upper left side of the screen that catches the attention the most at the first glance. So, you may want to position the most important KPIs and charts there!
When two charts or more help make the same decisions, it’s practical to have them on the same page (without having to scroll down in the dashboard) and as close to one another as possible. Also, you don’t want to make your dashboard too colorful. Use similar colors for the same data variable across different charts.
This way, you’ll build a brain map with your personalized dashboard and be able to understand it in seconds without having to read what each color stands for every single time.
4 - Make Sure You Can Access All Necessary Pages From One Place
A good dashboard UI design is meant to save time, not the opposite. That’s why the interface should enable you to access all the essential pages of your website from one single page. So, when building yours, ensure you can access for instance:
- Your Profile
- Content
- Landing Pages
- Data Charts
- Modules and/or Plugins
These are examples and not necessarily the only ones you need. You can choose yours and guarantee they are preserved in your dashboard UI design.
5 - Make Sure It’s Customizable
We mentioned earlier that you may find yourself interested in customizing your dashboard as you learn or come up with new ways to do things better. It is for this reason that you should make sure the site dashboard you’re opting for is easily customizable without the need to write codes or hire designers.
What Does the Best Admin Dashboard Design Look Like?
So, we now know the five criteria based on which we can choose the right site dashboard. You might be thinking about what it looks like. And most importantly, where can you find one!?
Let’s first take a look at this one:
This dashboard is built on top of the Total Control Admin Dashboard module, utilizing Panels, Google Analytics Reports, and several enhanced blocks and widgets for an intuitive and flexible administration experience.
From this dashboard, you can access literally every part of your website in seconds. Moreover, you can easily edit it and customize it to suit your needs without the need for any codes!
Also, one of the most powerful features of this dashboard is it supports the Google Analytics module. In other words, you can access the charts of Google Analytics from your dashboard UI without opening a new tab!
Conclusion
There are many site dashboards out there. But not all of them meet the five criteria of a good site dashboard. And even when one for instance seems to be good enough, you may find yourself urged to code any modification you think of! Varbase’s dashboard, however, works perfectly well with Drupal sites, and enables you to do any modifications with 0 codes!