This is the latest in our series of featured business dashboards, which highlights the interesting and different ways our customers are using Geckoboard. We hope that you will be inspired to try new ways of using your board, visualising your data and designing your dashboards.
The business dashboard we're featuring this time is that of SEOmoz, the Seattle based creators of the web's most popular SEO software, and the robust link intelligence API, mozScape.
Here at Geckoboard, we were really struck by the simplicity and focus of their dashboard when we first saw what the Mozzers had come up with. We've been digging in to stats about how our customers use Geckoboard and the numbers of dashboards and widgets that are created by a typical customer.
The average number of widgets per dashboard is 9, but this masks some of the outliers, which includes a mammoth 278 widgets on one particular customer's dashboard. Now, this may work perfectly well for their use-case, but as a general rule less is probably better than more and this is even one of our golden rules for successful dashboard design. It's a point that Jamie Steven, VP Marketing at SEOmoz, definitely understands as you can see from their Geckoboard dashboard:
We love Geckoboard here at SEOmoz, and created a 'Marketing Dashboard' that really focused on one big number: free trials per day.
— Jamie Steven, VP Marketing at SEOmoz
On this dashboard, they display just five metrics: trials today, trials yesterday, converted trials, closed trials and video views. For this they use our custom Number & Secondary Stat widgets, styling the text with custom CSS.
Business dashboard success - the excitement has spread
Providing such a stripped-down dashboard has really worked for them and it has meant that it's now not just the marketing team that keeps an eye on their Geckoboard:
Engineers, support folks all walk by and comment on how we're doing at that point in the day - 'hmm, we seem like we're having a slow day' or 'wow, we've already hit 100 and it's only 11am'. It's created an excitement in the office and this has spread within SEOmoz. Not only do other teams understand what the Marketing team are reporting and the excitement around goals and momentum, but they're now also using Geckoboard in their lobby as well as to monitor social media, their API, servers and costs.
