Comment by ianstormtaylor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ianstormtaylor | Hacker News Reader

Actually pretty unimpressed, and I usually like most things Panic makes. The UI seems like gloss for the sake of gloss, and it is very hard to parse too. What's with the super-bright colors and super-bright whites on a super-black background?

Not only that but Emails Sent seems like a useless vanity metric, so I'm surprised it made the demo screenshot. Is anyone really going around thinking that they need an emails sent dashboard?

And is it a personal status board or a team status board? Do I really need to see a MacRumors feed on team board? And a clock? All in the screen space of an iPad? Seems like they went with a "hey what can we put on this screen" design process instead of things a team _really_ needs.

Edit: I wasn't sold when Dashing[1] first launched, but the demo[2] that siong1987 posted seems pretty promising.

1: http://shopify.github.io/dashing/ 2: http://dashingdemo.herokuapp.com/sample

"Not only that but Emails Sent seems like a useless vanity metric."

We use it on our board to track the volume of support e-mails going out the door for each support agent. It's very useful!

If you measure something, people will adapt their behavior to what you're measuring. If you measure productivity by volume of mails, people will try to increase the volume of mails at the expense of what is in those mails.

From that perspective, I think dashboards are useful as a sort of warning signal for things going wrong, but not as indicators of whether things are going right. So, the right way to approach it in my opinion is to measure whether mails are being sent at all, because that would indicate a major issue.

You're assuming it's a productivity measure and not a "sheesh, Bob looks like he could use a hand today" sort of thing.

> What's with the super-bright colors and super-bright whites on a super-black background?

It’s called visibility from afar. You are not supposed to read it like a book.

> All in the screen space of an iPad

This is quite clearly meant to be used on a big screen via HDMI or Airplay.

If this is quite clear, why does the demo show an iPad?

I think the real concept is to use a dedicated iPad mini locked away as the driver for a display via HDMI.

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