Your dashboard should be the last thing you develop

After completing the registration process, the user lands on the dashboard. The dashboard is the launching point to everything else on the site, so it makes sense to drop the user here. So, over the course of this week I worked on a few different mockups for the dashboard. The process was much slower than when I was working on the mockups for the login page. By the third mockup for the dashboard, I realized why: I was trying to create a page for which I hadn’t conceptualized the content.

That isn’t to say I didn’t have ideas for content, I did. There are a lot of things I want to include on the site. From searching for users, to reading mail, to rating dates the user has been on. There’s no shortage of content for the dashboard. But I hadn’t thought through how any of it would work or correlate to other pages.

Let’s run with an example. I want to display other people on the user’s dashboard. After all, the intent of the site is for the user to meet people, go on dates, and fall in love. Okay, so the user needs to meet people. We need to display people for the user to meet. How do you display those people? What information do you include? How many people do you show? How does this area on the dashboard differ from the search page? If you haven’t developed a search page, or thought through how you display people to the user, then you’ll have no idea how to put together the dashboard.

In trying to put together mockups for the dashboard I realized that the dashboard is the very last page I should be creating. The dashboard is an amalgamation of bits and pieces from a lot of other pages. If you haven’t created those other pages, you can’t create your dashboard.

So below are the three mockups I created for the dashboard, but they may not bear any resemblance to the dashboard I’ll create in the future. As I was creating the mockups I also wrote my comments and thought process down in the margins (very useful, by the way, if you’re creating the mockups for yourself). My next step is to create a search and search results page. One of my mockups practically is a search page, and a part of another mockup could be used for search results, so I’m partway done. This next set of mockups should go a bit faster.

First dashboard mockup

Second dashboard mockup

Third dashboard mockup