Skip to the dashboards

Crown Media Service · Internal tools

Three dashboards, each built to get one decision made.

A marketing site has ninety seconds to make a stranger trust a business. An internal dashboard is the opposite document: the person reading it already works there, has seen the screen four hundred times, and opened it to do one thing. So there is no hero, no call to action, and nothing on any of these pages trying to persuade anybody of anything.

Open the toolsThe client sites

Every figure on all three is fictional sample data, and each one says so in its own chrome rather than in a footnote.

Three different jobs, not three colour schemes.

Triage, review, and decision are genuinely different documents. One is read in seconds many times a day; one is read slowly, once a week, in a room full of people; one is worked through line by line once a month and then defended. Density, typography, and even whether the page is light or dark follow from that.

  • Triage

    BoardHalvorsen Lift Service

    Elevator and escalator maintenance · Duluth, Minnesota

    An open-callback queue ranked by consequence rather than by the time the call came in — with the ranking rule printed above it, so the order can be argued with.

    The decision
    Which call does the next free technician take?
    Who opens it
    Dispatcher · Open all day, glanced at every few minutes

    What they said not to do

    • No map. We know where the buildings are.
    • No photographs of lift interiors or machine rooms.
    • Nothing that measures the dispatcher or ranks the technicians.
    • No live-activity feed. Nobody reads it and it moves while I am reading something else.
    • dispatch
    • elevator
    • field service
    • queue
    • triage
    • operations
    • dark ui
    Open BoardThe brief, PDF

    The board · Who is on · Under contract

  • Review

    TradeCommon Table Co-op

    Member-owned grocery, single store · Bloomington, Indiana

    A weekly trade review that ranks departments by how much they moved gross margin in dollars — so a nine-percent department that shed 2.7 points sorts above the biggest department in the store, which was flat.

    The decision
    Which departments does Monday’s meeting actually spend its time on, and which ones does it leave alone?
    Who opens it
    General manager · Monday, 09:00, with eleven department heads in the room

    What they said not to do

    • No per-person or per-till figures of any kind.
    • No pie chart of department mix. We have eleven departments and a table already shows it.
    • No 'top five' that always finds five.
    • No invented explanations in the reason column.
    • grocery
    • co-op
    • retail
    • margin
    • weekly review
    • finance
    • tables
    Open TradeThe brief, PDF

    The week · Departments · Members

  • Decision

    Rate sheetKeyline Storage

    Self-storage, four facilities · Chattanooga, Tennessee

    A rate worksheet that refuses to print an occupancy figure on its own — every proposed increase sits beside how long the last vacancy took to fill and what the last five move-ins actually paid.

    The decision
    Which unit sizes get an increase this month, and which sitting tenants get one?
    Who opens it
    Revenue manager · The 12th of the month, and defended at the end of it

    What they said not to do

    • No tenant names, contact details, or payment history.
    • No photographs of the facilities.
    • No occupancy figure printed on its own.
    • No recommendation without its evidence in the same row.
    • No gauge with a green zone. I have never once been helped by a needle.
    • self-storage
    • pricing
    • occupancy
    • yield
    • revenue
    • worksheet
    • monthly
    Open Rate sheetThe brief, PDF

    This month · Facilities · Sitting tenants

Six rules, and one of them is enforced by the compiler.

Every one of these came out of the briefs rather than out of a style guide. Three operators independently described the same ways an internal tool loses their trust.

No number without a baseline
“142 calls” is not information; “142, against 118 the same week last year” is. The stat component takes a required baseline prop, so a bare figure is a type error rather than a code review comment.
The rule is printed on the page
Each of these sorts or recommends by something. The dispatch priority order, the $750 discussion threshold, the five tests before a tenant’s rent moves — all printed where they apply, so the output can be argued with instead of merely obeyed.
Freshness and provenance are chrome
Every screen states its as-of time and what it was refreshed from. A static snapshot presented honestly beats a page that looks live and is ten minutes stale.
Status is never colour alone
Every state carries a word. Colour only decides how loudly it is drawn, so the screens survive a colour vision deficiency, a forced-colours mode, and a dim room at a bad angle.
Sample data says so, on its face
Plausible operational figures are exactly the kind that get mistaken for a record, so the stamp sits in the header of every screen rather than in the footer.
What is not here
No donut charts, no gauges with a green zone, no dual-axis plots, no KPI tiles with a green arrow and no baseline, no sidebar of unnameable icons, and no chart with a y-axis that starts somewhere other than zero without saying so.