Best Practices: Home Dashboard

Your home dashboard is one of the most important and frequently visited spaces on your intranet. This area must be 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.

If you are looking to drive more engagement on your feed, we recommend choosing a layout with the feed on the home dashboard.

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. 

What content to add to your home carousel

• 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.

• We recommend updating your home carousel weekly, so you can continue driving traffic and awareness to different content themes within your intranet.

Tiles to add to your home dashboard

• Company values & priorities tile (content tile)

  • Include a tile that points people to your values, mission, strategic initiatives, key announcements, etc.

• Executive updates/blog tile (content tile)

  • Recently published Executive/Leadership pages

  • Recently published Executive/Leadership blogs

  • Executive team (people tile)

• Recognition tile

  • Include your recognition tile on your home dashboard

• Featured/popular sites (site title)

  • Include featured/popular sites like Benefits, CEO Corner, Sales/Marketing, etc.

  • Rotate your featured sites monthly to showcase a project, division, or committee

• Onboarding tile

  • Include the onboarding tile on your home dashboard

  • This will automatically show onboarding content to users within their first 90 days.

  • Read more about onboarding.

• Important external web links/quick links tile (links tile)

  • Link to commonly used links like: Benefits, expenses, CRM, website, etc.

  • Link to commonly used forms, calendars,

  • Link to external blog posts, company announcements, or video content

• Use image tiles to link to key announcements or updates (image or video tiles)

  • All hands meeting, CEO/leadership interviews, Press Release announcements, etc.

• Intranet Help/Best Practices

  • If you've recently launched, it is helpful to point people to help articles on how they can use the intranet via a custom content tile

• Social

  • Social Campaigns tile

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