Missing Features

Your correspondent had an epiphany sitting at Macromedia Max in 2003 when he saw a demo of Macromedia Central: dashboard, widget and gadget applications are useless 99% of the time to 99% of users.

Macromedia Central claimed to be a lot, but it wasn’t. It was more worthlessware than software. Essentially Central was what OS X Widgets and Vista Gadgets are now.

The problem with this entire paradigm is the same problem with bubble portal sites: dashboards are mostly just content filler and don’t support common user work flow.

Deconstructing Dashboards

Take a few common dashboard examples:

1. Stock quotes;
2. Calculator;
3. News/RSS;
4. Photo gallery; and,
5. Weather.

The stock quotes gadget is the first a user typical adds. Cool! The Dow Jones Index! Then after a few days, the shine wears off and the user realizes they don’t own publicly traded stock and they aren’t a day trader. Sure, the widget has initial coolness value, but the tool doesn’t support common user work flow.

Calculator, RSS readers and photo gallery widgets are great examples of repetitive tools: each one is served better, elsewhere. There is a built in calculator in your operating system or one in your desk drawer. And 99% of users can use a physical calculator faster than a computer based version.

RSS is already being consumed in Google Reader, Feedburner or Microsoft Outlook. Besides, a user doesn’t sit a computer waiting for new news items to come in. The PC-Internet combination is an interactive medium, where the user goes out to consume what they want, when they want it. They don’t wait around for their NY Times widget to start beeping.

A weather widget is almost useful on a dashboard. But like spell check, weather should be integrated into your operating system. Forget forcastfox, weather information should reside underneath the clock in the bottom right of the start menu (in Windows) or somewhere in that weird top menu bar (in OS X).

Rich or poor, educated or not, male or female, you care about the weather.

But Wait! There’s More!

Now a whole bunch of power users are going to report how they can’t live without widget X and how widget X makes working on Y so much easier. That’s true, but the problem is you are power users, you are the 1 percenters.

Sure, you build the software the world runs on. But you build it for the other 99 percent of users.

Fred Wilson writes an outstanding blog about being a venture capitalist in the New York. But uncharacteristically, he gets widget’s all wrong. Try reading his blog and you will only hope that someday, the widgets might be removed.

(Wait! What about the Twitter widget? That one works because a fan of his blog wants to know what he is doing. Part of being a fan of a personal blog like Fred’s is really about being a fan of Fred.)

Wrapping Up

A Dashboard is best used on computer systems that serve highly specialized work flows, like monitoring flow control in a nuclear power plant or keeping an eye on network traffic of your website during your Super Bowl Ad.

In this instance, a Dashboard works becuase it provides highly meaningful content to the user. The incoming data helps the user do their job. Anything less than meaningful content and your dashboard is just pop and no fizz.

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