I don’t watch a lot of TV but back in January I sat down to indulge a guilty pleasure and turned on an episode of BBC’s Top Gear. For the uninitiated Top Gear is about as cliched and over-the-top as you could imagine a TV show dedicated to cliched and over-the-top automobiles might be... If you’re located in the UK you can watch the full episode here on BBC iPlayer.

This particular episode had the show’s three presenters hooning around Italy in a selection of supercars carrying out the usual assortment of challenges and infantile antics. The cars they chose were a Lamborghini Aventador, McLaren MP4-12C and a Noble M600.

At one point the action cut to a shot of the Lamborghini’s dashboard, immediately I recoiled and had to rewind, pause and take a second look. Now, I admit that I’m probably more sensitive than most when it comes to dashboard displays but as I stared into that Lambo’s dashboard all I could see was its flaws.

I could almost feel synapses in my brain frantically firing as I tried to make sense of what I was looking at but gradually the confusion subsided and I was able to deconstruct what was going on. I’ve since looked at several pictures of the Aventador’s dashboard and each time it’s the same - there’s unnecessary cognitive overhead involved in extracting useful data from that dash - not ideal for a dashboard of any kind let alone something with a top speed of over 200mph!

Take a look at this video of the dashboard in action - go ahead, try it in high resolution and imagine looking down at this while trying to keep the vehicle on the track at speed.

The dashboard is alive; a riotous festival of popup transition animations, colours coming in and out, fast moving numbers and a Lamborghini logo sitting in the bottom right lest you forget what brand of supercar you’re about to total!

So what’s happening here? What did this dashboard get so wrong?

Low resolution TFT display

This obviously allows for a degree of flexibility but it’s manifestly unhelpful especially considering the manufacturers seem to have gone all out to cram as many distracting elements and animations as the technology will allow. Dashboards are a pretty pure case of “less is more” yet the dashboard designers here have sacrificed that entirely at the altar of “flashy”.

Inconsistent and poor typeface choice

The main typeface used for the dial numbers, the time, and the date is overweight and oblique making it unnecessarily hard to read particularly at a glance.

The typeface choice for the dial descriptions and the external temperature is different to the main typeface. I doubt there’s a significance behind this except for the fact that if the main typeface was reduced in size any further it would be completely unreadable. I can’t think of a reason for one typeface being used for the date and time and another being used for the outside temperature. Mixing typefaces in this way adds to the overall confusion and detracts from the primary function of the dashboard - displaying actionable data at-a-glance.

Inconsistent use of colour

The fuel gauge has an amber section that sits between a red section and a black section. If the needle dips into the amber area then action is needed to avoid it going into the red. Yet, even with the needle on red or amber, the fuel symbol is always displayed in green.

Inconsistent positioning

The fuel gauge and oil pressure symbols are positioned offset to the bottom of their respective meters yet the water temperature and oil temperature symbols are positioned offset in the middle of their meters. It’s not clear whether there’s any significance to this, it certainly doesn’t help with “glance-ability” and it drives a coach and horses through any attempts at consistency.

Pointless and distracting chrome

Look at the detailing around the outside of the speed gauge, the enclosing line with peaks and valleys. It's intersected by major ticks on the peaks marking the labels in 30km/h increments (except for the first 2 which, although similarly spaced to my eye, show 20km/h increments). Minor ticks show 10km/h increments from there. I don’t know what the peaks and troughs bring to the party but this unnecessary detail is at the expense of readability. Same goes for the gradient on the inner band of the dial.

If we compare it to the dashboard of a 2012 BMW M5 the glaring deficiencies become even more obvious.

Here you can see 2 main gauges and 2 smaller secondary gauges each clean and stripped back to essentials to communicate clearly. Beneath the gauges is a clear and unambiguous set of tertiary information in a readable typeface presented in one colour - the result is something useful and readable and, frankly, beautiful.

With dashboard design, it’s easy to get caught up with what you could show but to create something beautiful and usable you need to pay close attention to the constraints. At the risk of sounding too Zen, here are a couple of rules to keep in mind.

1. Every element must have a purpose and that purpose is to communicate something meaningful and with clarity. If it doesn’t do both it has no place and must be eliminated.
2. No element is an island. The design of individual components must show awareness and respect for the visual consistency of the whole board.

And just in case you thought the Aventador’s dashboard was a one-off lapse from Lamborghini, here’s my parting gift: a shot of the dashboard from a car Lamborghini debuted in 2007 called the Reventón.

If you're interested in dashboard design you should come and work for us! Check out the Geckoboard jobs page or send me a mail at paul at geckoboard dot com.

We're always updating and improving Geckoboard but we haven't done a good job of communicating this recently. That's going to change and to get the ball rolling here are a few of the updates we've pushed out in the past couple of weeks:

• Dozens of bug fixes and enhancements.
• Full screen support for iPad - Save your sharing URL as an app on your homescreen and it will open full screen in Safari.
• In app message center - To make it easier for you to get hold of us. Look out for the 'Messages' link at the top of your screen when you're logged in.
• 28 day period in Google Analytics - Now you can see the past 28 days as well as yesterday, past 7 days and past 30 days.
• Faster widget loading - Our dashboards now load faster and this is just the beginning.
• Mixpanel events union - Allows you to do a union across multiple events.
• Push API - We've opened up the Push API to more customers. This allows you to push data to your widgets without having to expose it via an API. You can find out more about this in our documentation. If you would like to push data to your widgets in real time email help@geckoboard.com.

Look out for more updates coming soon and don’t forget, use our RSS feed or our Twitter or Facebook profiles to find out about all our updates and news.

 

Geckoboard will be unavailable tomorrow (Wednesday 29th February) from 10am UTC (10am GMT / Wednesday 29th 2am PST) for a maximum of 30 minutes. Check our Twitter account for any updates.

 

I'm sorry for the inconveniance. 

UPDATE (11.20 GMT): We're back up. Sorry for the delay with getting back online.

 

Geckoboard is pleased to announce that we have joined forces with IAdea, a pioneer and leader in digital signage appliances. The partnership means that Geckoboard is now available on IAdea's HTML5-enabled Digital Signage Web Appliances.

IAdea has been a leading maker of compact, low-power, fanless media players for the digital signage industry. With its latest HTML5-enabled Web Appliances (offering 3 player boxes with wired, wireless networking, and live TV-input functions, and 2 digital signboards of 18.5" and 24" in size), IAdea's products can play rich and live information pulled from the web using the HTML5 open standard and that includes Geckoboard.

To accompany this announcement, we are offering IAdea customers a 90 day free trial of Geckoboard, worth up to $597, until 31st March 2012. To claim this offer, just head over to IAdea and fill out the form.

 

A lot of European customers have been asking for detailed maps for their region so here it is. Not only has Europe been added to the list of supported maps (joining World and USA) but you can also zoom in on individual countries. Here's a shot showing a European and UK map.

We'll be rolling out to other regions in the coming weeks so let us know what you would like to see.

Right now it's only available in custom map widgets but we're going to enable it for Chartbeat and GoSquared map widgets soon also.

Extra: Resizable Widgets

The ability to resize widgets is here at last and we're looking for testers. We'll be announcing availability in tranches on Geckoboard's Facebook page so head over there and Like us to get the first glimpse and early access!

Use our RSS feed or our Twitter or Facebook profiles to keep up-to-date with news and future updates.

Push it!

Headquartered in New York, NY, Boxcar has sent over 700 million notifications to iPhones and Macs  around the world. Want to know the moment someone mentions you on Twitter or a friend checks in on Foursquare? Boxcar handles it all. With integrations to tons of services it allows you to read notifications where and when you want them.

Mission Critical Metrics
Needless to say, when you're growing fast tracking and communicating operational metrics is vitally important - this is where Geckoboard comes in.

"Being able to insightfully see where we're at for the day compared to the previous day or week is ultra important", says Jonathan George, CEO and founder.

"Geckoboard enables us to keep an eye on mission-critical metrics, as well as providing an early warning system for both positive and negative events."

Specifically they use Geckoboard to give a real-time breakdown of the overall state and health of Boxcar on a real-time basis including core operational metrics such as:

• New user signups
• New services
• Number of pushes

They're currently accessing Geckoboard from their laptops, iPhones and iPad and will soon have a big screen in the office dedicated to running Geckoboard to give everyone in the office access to their real-time operational stats.

We've just pushed out an update to the Pingdom widget which allows you to display trending data, for both uptime and response time.

Here's a screen shot of it in action:

 

The widget uses the Pingdom API to pull in historical data. You can set a time period of either 24 hours, 7 days or 30 days. The data displayed is configurable so you can show just the uptime, just the response time or both.

To add the new widget just add a new Pingdom widget and then select the "Trends" dropdown (the status widget is now available as "Current status"):

 

 

This widget allows you to quickly see a sites trending performance over a time period. 

Today is a very exciting day for us here at Geckoboard - I'd like to welcome the latest addition to the team, Rob Hudson!

Rob is joining us as co-founder and CTO and will instrumental in the continuing success of Geckoboard. He's already getting stuck in working on new features and enhancements and you can expect a lot more in the coming weeks and months.

Welcome to the family Rob. We couldn't be happier to have you on board; it's great news for Geckoboard and, ultimately, our customers.

We've been a little quiet on the product announcements recently. That's mainly because we're working on some big enhancements that are coming soon, but in the meantime, in addition to a ton of bug fixes and minor enhancements here are some changes that we think you're going to love.

Map Styling

Since we released the custom maps widget in June we've been bombarded with requests for enhancements. Top of the list was the ability to change the size and colour of map points. Well now you can!

Updated documentation can be found here but, in short, you can either add the size (1=tiny 10=large) and colour attributes next to the coordinates of each point or, for greater control over appearance, simply add a CSS class to each map point and upload a CSS file with the required attributes for that class to define the point's colour and opacity and it's stoke attributes.

Look out for country and region map zooming in the next couple of weeks.

Chartbeat & GoSquared Maps

If you're using real-time web analytics services chartbeat or GoSquared you can now see the location of your most recent visitors on a beautiful Geckoboard map. WARNING: Watching this update can get very addictive, but if you're a real-time map junkie like me then you're going to love it!

Private RSS & Atom Feeds

In addition to regular, public RSS and Atom feeds that you've been able to display on your dashboard for some time, from today you can also display private feeds that require a username and password. This is great news for customers of tons of services out there that offer protected feeds and getting them on to your board is a snap. You can find the RSS and Atom widget under the "Notifications" category.

That's all for now but we're looking forward to hearing what you think in the comments below.

You can use our RSS feed or our Twitter or Facebook profiles to keep up-to-date with news and future updates.