Overview
A dashboard floorplan gives teams fast context across health, throughput, and action risk.
It should reduce decision latency through clear prioritization, role-relevant modules, and limited motion.
Treat the dashboard as an entry point: every metric, exception, and queue item should disclose freshness and lead to evidence or action.
Monitor health and move priority work
Change the reporting range, refresh source status, inspect performance, and move urgent requests into active review.
Good morning, Maya
Review service health and act on the work that could miss policy.
Completed requests
Approvals approaching SLA
Approval time improved
faster after routing finance requests directly to the policy owner.
Anatomy
Use each piece in this order to keep interpretation and automation consistent.
- 1Hero metric row
Top-level KPIs with unit and trend context.
- 2Action rail
Quick path to most critical operational actions.
- 3Trend modules
Mini charts and alerts with relative recency.
- 4Work queue
Prioritized items with status and ownership.
- 5Secondary insights
Contextual modules for exceptions and next checks.
The ordering here is not visual-only; it reflects interaction priority and expected user cognition. Keep this order unless policy demands a specific domain exception.
When to use
Use this pattern when the user needs guided consistency, state, and reuse at scale.
Recommended
- Executive review
Use for quick periodic status checks across multiple streams.
- On-call rotation
Use with triage indicators and criticality tags.
- Product operations
Use for recurring release and support standups.
When not to use
Avoid forcing this pattern where simpler, direct interactions are sufficient.
Avoid
- Single transaction flow
Use detail pages for step-by-step tasks.
- Highly dense operational tables
Use list-report floorplan instead.
- Read-only portals
Avoid heavy controls when no actions are needed.
Variants
A small number of variants helps teams choose correctly without adding complexity.
Executive
Top-level snapshots with strategic metrics.
Operations
Action-first view with urgent queues and escalation status.
Configurable
Widget-level editing by role and workspace.
States
States communicate readiness, risk, and expected user behavior.
| State | Trigger | Visual response | Interaction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Loading | Fresh data fetch | Skeleton cards and fallback totals | Keep CTA available if safe. |
| Healthy | No blocking alerts | Green trend and confidence indicators | Encourage routine review actions. |
| Alert | SLA breach or backlog | Contrast-heavy badges | Expose quick remediation actions. |
| Stale | Refresh deadline exceeded | Last-updated time and stale source warning | Preserve prior values and offer a manual retry. |
| Partial data | One or more sources unavailable | Unavailable modules identify the affected source | Keep independent modules usable and avoid a misleading global total. |
Behavior
Behavior should remain predictable across devices, permissions, and async edges.
Refresh strategy
Use pull-to-refresh and interval sync with clear staleness states.
Composable cards
Allow layout-level config for role-specific dashboards.
Traceability
Each metric links to the underlying detail source.
Accessibility
Keep interaction clarity high and ensure assistive technologies get the same meaning.
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| gh | Navigate to dashboard home section when keyboard bindings are configured. |
| 1 | Jump to first primary widget in keyboard mode. |
| R | Refresh dashboard data manually if supported. |
- Do not show critical alerts only through color.
- Use headings and landmarks to group metric groups.
- Keep widget ordering stable to reduce screen reader disorientation.
- Provide text summaries for chart direction, period, and comparison.
- Announce refresh completion and queue changes through a polite live region.
Content guidelines
Consistency is achieved by language standards, not by design only.
Metric copy
Prefer nouns + verbs that indicate actionability.
SLA breaches this week
Trend language
Use plain trend language in addition to sparklines.
Down 4% from last week
Prioritization
Order cards by business urgency, not alphabet.
Open incidents first, then usage metrics.
Examples
Reference implementation style, payloads, and practical behavior.
Compose an operations dashboard
- Show one clear callout for escalation before less critical metrics.
- Keep the reporting period controlled at page level so every module compares the same range.
- Preserve semantic headings, regions, and source freshness when arranging cards.
Model freshness independently
- Track source status per module instead of hiding partial failures behind one page-level loading state.
- Keep the last verified value visible when policy allows and label it as stale.
- Exclude unavailable values from derived totals and state that exclusion in plain language.
Props / API
Use these API entries as a baseline contract and validate them against your domain layer.
These names are implementation-oriented and should map to your local contracts.
Props