Discover how a university web team and a digital agency came together to build a dashboard that helps 500 editors manage 130 Drupal sites—and what you should consider when designing dashboards for your own users.

When 500 editors across 130 sites log into our web platform, the first thing they see is a dashboard designed to support their work. But what should that dashboard actually do? Over the last year, we’ve been figuring out how to answer that question. The result is a dashboard that surfaces what matters most to our editors: announcements about new features, their recent edits, broken links, accessibility issues, duplicate profiles, permissions, design settings, and more.

This session isn’t a technical deep-dive into code; it’s the story of the decisions behind the dashboard. We’ll share how we prioritized features, balanced editor needs with technical realities, and decided what belonged on the dashboard—and what didn’t. Attendees will walk away with lessons they can apply to their own platforms, whether they manage one site or one hundred.

Learning Objectives

  • Prioritizing and balancing user needs and platform priorities
  • Identify key considerations when deciding what information belongs on a dashboard for site editors.
  • Develop an approach to building dashboards that scale across multiple sites and editor roles.

Prerequisites

Attendees will get the most out of this session by being familiar with a Web CMS administrative interface, and the challenges of supporting multiple content editors or multiple sites.

Audience: Advanced, Intermediate Track(s): Content Strategy, General, Site Building, UX / Design