Business Dashboard Roundup – Plus How You Can Make Your Own (Soon)

In: Business Ideas By: Brian Armstrong

5 Apr 2010

I recently posted some screenshots of some internal dashboards I built a while back at UniversityTutor.com.  These are fun and addictive to check each day, but they can also serve an important purpose in your business of keeping you motivated and helping you spot trends.

Here are some cool dashboards I’ve spotted around the web lately:

1. The Panic.com Dashbaord

Gorgeous design.  Tracks daily signups across their various products, plus support queues, daily revenue, local bus schedules, upcoming events, and twitter mentions.

They also mounted it on their wall with a flat panel display which make it great as a rallying point around the office.  More info on their blog.

2. The Tumblr.com Dashboard

Tumblr shows some nice stats on their public about page.

3. The CulturedCode.com Dashboard

Has a train station motif going on.  Nice work.

4. The Google Dashboard

I visited the Google offices recently and they have this dashboard in their lobby which shows the locations of Google searches happening in real time.

I also remember reading a story about Amazon in their early days where they setup a dashboard internally that rang a bell every time they made a sale.  So they could even incorporate audio (a “cha-ching!” sound whenever you make a sale).  It was a great way to help the team celebrate small victories.

So how do you get one of these for your own business?

These dashboards are beautiful, but they are all custom built and take quite a bit of programmer time.  So for the last few weeks I’ve been thinking about building a web site that helps people create dashboards like this.

I’d like it to be an open framework that is easy to build on top of.  This way, designers all over the world can submit their own dashboards based on the API and backend, and there would be some really creative stuff come out of it (just like Facebook opened their platform to let people create Facebook apps, or WordPress let anyone create “themes”).

There are still lots of technical details to work out on a project like that, but I’ve started looking into it.  If you have any thoughts, as always feel free to let me know in the comments….

Brian Armstrong

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