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Show HN: Castor, a live dashboard for your projects

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Re: Show HN: Castor, a live dashboard for your projects

#71

Post by jaxn »

ams6110 wrote: post #64
jaxn wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is spot on. A KPI is not a number, but rather a number, a direction, and a target. Also, gauges are almost always a terrible visual indicator. Even car dashboards are starting to understand this. Fuel gauges are good, speedometers are not.

Why are speedometers not good? Speed is analog, seems appropriate to display it in analog. And you can tell at a glance if speed is increasing or decreasing by the direction the dial/indicator is moving.

Sometimes, going 50mph is slow, sometimes it will get you arrested. The position on the dial is completely irrelevant, and is thus noise.

The gas gauge however has a permanent meaning. Empty is bad. The Tachometer is also useful if you are driving a manual since you want to keep from redlining and keep from stalling.

On almost every business dashboard I have seen, gauges are more like speedometers.

People love to put revenue in a gauge. More is better and they usually have a goal that they want to hit. But what happens if they max out the gauge? Do they stop sales? Or do they adjust the gauge to go higher (thus making it even more meaningless and difficult to read).

Re: Show HN: Castor, a live dashboard for your projects

#72

Post by jaxn »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #37
weego wrote: post #16

One of the things that really hit home at my last job and that I see missing from a lot of these dashboards is comparative context. So I walk in in the morning and we have a dashboard for vists and signups / payments and it shows lots of visits and no payments. Is that normal? Is that expected or concerning? Without showing what it was yesterday at the same time or on the same day last week, or weekly/monthly avg how…

When I've built dashboards I usually try and show that by having barcharts of averages for different time periods. Example: MRR+ Today, MRR+/Day over last 7 days, MRR+/Day over last 30 days, etc. It's still not perfect, but it adds at least an element of that "at a glance" context.

I like area + line charts for this. The area fill is the comp period and the line is the current.

One of my favorite ways to do this (that most charting packages struggle with) is to use an area full for last year, a solid line for this year, and a dotted line for the future based on current trajectory.

You can compare to multiple periods using stacked areas (particularly when you can assume previous periods had growth).

Re: Show HN: Castor, a live dashboard for your projects

#73

Post by [deleted] »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #37
weego wrote: post #16

One of the things that really hit home at my last job and that I see missing from a lot of these dashboards is comparative context. So I walk in in the morning and we have a dashboard for vists and signups / payments and it shows lots of visits and no payments. Is that normal? Is that expected or concerning? Without showing what it was yesterday at the same time or on the same day last week, or weekly/monthly avg how…

When I've built dashboards I usually try and show that by having barcharts of averages for different time periods. Example: MRR+ Today, MRR+/Day over last 7 days, MRR+/Day over last 30 days, etc. It's still not perfect, but it adds at least an element of that "at a glance" context.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Castor, a live dashboard for your projects

#74

Post by jaxn »

AznHisoka wrote: post #17
weego wrote: post #16

One of the things that really hit home at my last job and that I see missing from a lot of these dashboards is comparative context. So I walk in in the morning and we have a dashboard for vists and signups / payments and it shows lots of visits and no payments. Is that normal? Is that expected or concerning? Without showing what it was yesterday at the same time or on the same day last week, or weekly/monthly avg how…

you know.. I have been an user of some of these paid dashboards and you hit on a very good point! historical context is something I always felt was missing. i end up having to store the history myself and comparing it but it would make sense for these dashboards to be "smart" and actually do a little more than just display the current data.

You can do this with Klipfolio. That is the one I am currently using.

Re: Show HN: Castor, a live dashboard for your projects

#75

Post by epynonymous »

dagw wrote: post #65
ams6110 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are speedometers not good? Speed is analog, seems appropriate to display it in analog. And you can tell at a glance if speed is increasing or decreasing by the direction the dial/indicator is moving.

For what it's worth my current car has both an analog and digital speedometer, and I never look at the analog speedometer anymore. The digital is just so much quicker and easier to read.

same here, i'm venturing a guess that you drive a mini?

Re: Show HN: Castor, a live dashboard for your projects

#76

Post by untangle »

dagw wrote: post #65
ams6110 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are speedometers not good? Speed is analog, seems appropriate to display it in analog. And you can tell at a glance if speed is increasing or decreasing by the direction the dial/indicator is moving.

For what it's worth my current car has both an analog and digital speedometer, and I never look at the analog speedometer anymore. The digital is just so much quicker and easier to read.

Look at the HUDs of modern fighters. (I'm familiar with the F/A-18). All digital (except angle of attack, if memory serves). Much easier to parse.

Re: Show HN: Castor, a live dashboard for your projects

#77

Post by iamzozo »

koolba wrote: post #38

New year, new SaaS dashboard company... It's nice to see transparent pricing though I wonder how realistic it is. $4/month for unlimited everything, regardless of customer size? While it's nice to see pricing thats 1-2 orders of magnitude less that competitors (seriously look it up), forget turning a profit, you could easily get net-negative per customer on bandwidth pricing alone. The trailer says, " Castor is a ser…

Btw, it's interesting, that a guy wanted to imigrate to Canada, in this post, with this HN item id: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10033111

Re: Show HN: Castor, a live dashboard for your projects

#78

Post by koolba »

iamzozo wrote: post #77
koolba wrote: post #38

New year, new SaaS dashboard company... It's nice to see transparent pricing though I wonder how realistic it is. $4/month for unlimited everything, regardless of customer size? While it's nice to see pricing thats 1-2 orders of magnitude less that competitors (seriously look it up), forget turning a profit, you could easily get net-negative per customer on bandwidth pricing alone. The trailer says, " Castor is a ser…

Btw, it's interesting, that a guy wanted to imigrate to Canada, in this post, with this HN item id: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10033111

Haha! I found that too after Googling the number. Thought it was a weird coincidence as well.
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