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Dashboard – Features

It works like this:

A dashboard is the welcoming screen of your app, it provides a starting point for the user. A features dashboard shows what the user can do with the app and highlights what’s new. The dashboard can be static or dynamic, e.g. you can incorporate live wallpapers and changing content such as news items.
A features dashboard lays out the key functionality of your app full screen. It provides easy access to important tasks and functions. Features are displayed as an icon plus title in a grid lay-out.

Use when

A features dashboard can be used when your application is task-oriented and supports multiple tasks or features. A dashboard is ideal if you want to provide a quick overview of interesting, new, or frequently used tasks. A dashboard can be paired with an action bar, e.g. to provide a search option for users.

The Good

  • A user has easy access to the most important tasks
  • The dashboard gives an overview of the application's functionality
  • If customizable can be a set of key features the user what quick access to. (Bernardo)
  • Good for intermediate to expert users, because they roughly know what to do when they launch the app. (Borrys Hasian)

The Bad

  • A dashboard takes up a lot of screen real estate
  • The features displayed in the dashboard can be perceived as the only features of the app
  • A dashboard can present an extra click to get to the actual data (pjv)
  • Not easy to develop categories with gridView... (yurena)
  • Slow navigation switching tasks. Have to go to dashboard and then choose the desired task/view.An app should start in the most frequent view (Martin)

Examples

Twitter

1 Twitter's home screen is a dashboard, that displays the most important functionalities. In this screen shot it also shows how many new tweets there are. The action bar provides quick links to search, tweet and app home.

Appie

1 Appie helps you shop the dutch supermarket Albert Heijn and find recipes. It displays a large amount of features on its dashboard, which showcases the versatility off the app.

Evernote

1 Evernote's dashboard displays 6 items. The upper two are actual features. Below this a thin line indicates an other type of items, that help users navigate to content. This two sorts of items show that it is not necessary to strictly hold on to the rule of only placing features on a dashboard.

2 Responses to Dashboard – Features

  1. mut tony says:
    July 4, 2012 at 11:12 am

    Thanks for the precise tutorial..

  2. momani says:
    April 28, 2013 at 12:31 pm

    the blog is very very nice and all of the posts but you should upload samples of the designs implemented on android not only ideas and graphs

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