Best Practices: Home Dashboard

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Your home dashboard is one of the most important and frequently visited spaces on your intranet. It is extremely important that this area is best set up to guide users to the right information and help you meet the objectives you’ve set for your intranet.

• Goals: The key things to keep in mind when designing your dashboard.
• Design Best Practices: Guidance on how to best organize your dashboard.
• Content Best Practices: A list of some of the most popular information that our customers are putting on their dashboards. 

Goals

The following are important items to keep in mind when designing your dashboard (and your intranet).

• Project your company’s priorities
• Support your key objectives for your intranet
• Spotlight important information & events
• Provide easy navigation to important areas and information
• Encourage engagement and participation
• Offer help for people to get the most out of the intranet

Design Best Practices

We offer a number of ways for you to organize your dashboard. These recommendations will help make sure you’re getting maximum value.

• Include the Smart Feed on your dashboard so users can easily see their most current, personalized information.
• Order tiles/information by importance and frequency of use: most important/used information should be higher on the page.
• Make sure to spread tiles out to fill up empty space under columns to limit the need to scroll down.
• Experiment with different layouts as these can increase or decrease the size of your carousel and space for tiles.
• Regularly use your analytics data to confirm you are highlighting the right information, e.g., commonly used search teams may speak for the need to add a link to a site or content; highly trafficked sites should be easily accessible.

Content Best Practices

The areas below list some of the most common items our customers include on their dashboards. This is guiding information only, so consider what’s most important for your users and organization based on your goals.

For more information on adding Tiles to your dashboards, click here. 

Note

Content tile = Add pages, events, albums

• Carousel: Regularly update your carousel with important content and information applicable to the entire organization. This can be from sources within the intranet, or external sources.

• Company Values & Priorities

• Core values, mission, strategic initiatives, key announcements, etc. (Sites & categories tile, Content tile)
• Feed of company posts on Facebook or Twitter (Social media & RSS tile)

• Executive Presence

• Links to CEO or Exec site or pages (Sites & categories tile, Content tile)
• Links to key executive posts (Content tile)
• Executive team (People tile)

• Important & Popular Sites

• HR, All Employees, CEO Corner, Sales & Marketing, Diversity & Inclusion, etc. (Sites tile)

• Important & Popular Files

• HR forms, Holiday calendar, Industry publications, etc. (Files tile)

• Important External Websites (overlaps with Apps launcher option)

• Benefits site, Expenses, CRM, etc. (Text, HTML, & links tile)
• All hands meeting, CEO/leadership interviews, Press Release announcements, etc. (Image & Video tile)

• Intranet Help/Best Practices

• Dedicated site for intranet end users (Sites tile)
• Dedicated site for intranet managers (Sites tile)

• Employee Recognition

• Content tile
• Image & video tile 
• Text, HTML, and links: HTML integration to pull in recognition data from a 3rd party vendor

• Social

• Social Campaigns tile
• Feed of company posts on Facebook or Twitter (Social media & RSS tile)

• Focused Latest & Popular Content (Content tile): Our feed includes block posts for latest & popular content, but you can highlight a type of content and/or a specific site’s content.

• New Employee Onboarding/FAQ 

• Sites & categories tile
• Content tile
• This article contains more onboarding/new hire best practices

Note

Try to use the Content (“Add pages, events...”) and “Sites & categories” tiles when linking within the intranet for ease of set-up and better analytics.