Pete-
Thanks for the post! Have you checked out the following post for some inspiration?
There’s a few different approaches to designing a dashboard, so you might start by thinking about what you are trying to accomplish. I see two dichotomous visual approaches to dashboards frequently being used:
- Show a lot of stuff on a single dashboard
- Simple, with a few key items (lots of spacing)
Alternatively, it might help to think about how you are trying to use the dashboard.
- See a quick status of security devices
- See the status of everything in your house
- Quick at a glance view of the weather, time, etc with the option of drilling into devices
- Mobile interface to your home
- Etc.
For example, take a look at this dashboard approach, which has some key information available on it (like weather and time), but you have to tap on one of the tiles along the bottom of the screen to drill in to view more details or control things:
Compare that with the following approach which has a variety of devices, weather, time, and navigational elements on it. From a functional perspective, everything is right at the users fingertips and they can see the status of a variety of things at once. From a visual perspective, this has a lot of things happening on it all at once which might be overwhelming for some.
There are some approaches to striking a bit more of a balance though. Take the following which is a bit of a variation from the previous setup. The difference being that color was stripped from the tiles using Dashboard Settings and tiles only light up if they are active. Specifically, security related tiles are customized to show orange if they are insecure (eg. unlocked/open). Again, this still might not be quite as visually appealing as the first option, but it provides a bit more information about the status of the home at a glance.
You’ll find more examples users have posted in the Share your cool SharpTools project! - #14 by Alfredo thread, so I encourage you to check that out as well!
(And perhaps it’s time I create a new “Show off your Dashboards” thread!)