While the new dashboard hasn’t been released, it’s getting really close and we’re eagerly anticipating it arriving.  Seeing as holding in all of what we’ve been developing for this is killing me, I think I’ll share a couple of the features with our blog readers to give them a preview of what to expect.

Our intention originally with Dashboard (when it was called Frontpage) was a simple access point to many parts of the site.  We renamed it to “Dashboard” recently as we thought the name was more synonymous with what we were trying to do with the original page.  And after we renamed it, we took another look at it and attempted to view it from another angle.  We realized it was nowhere near the access point we wanted it to be and had so little features that oftentimes it was being overlooked by users.  So we put it on our real big list of stuff we wanted to do.

Over the past couple of weeks, you’ve noticed the message on the dashboard page telling you that we were secretly working on our newest incarnation of the dashboard.  While this is true, we’ve also been working on a bunch of other project simultaneously, which slowed down the development time of Dashboard.  Then, while we began to redo Dashboard, we completely once again changed our idea on how we wanted the page to work…

We knew we wanted the page to be an access point (as mentioned) to other parts of the site.  And we also knew we would be much too presumptuous to assume which point all users would want to access our site at.  So we decided on creating an interface that would allow complete customization (from what’s on the page, down to where it’s positioned).

Keeping with this thought, we created a widget based Dashboard that allowed anyone to pick and choose not only which widgets were on the page, but where there were placed on the screen.  This level of personalization allowed for us to have a page that could serve as your main access point as you’d design it to have only what you wanted.  Things that were not important to you could be removed for those you felt were more important.

Using this widget based system not only allowed for extreme personalization on your end, but allowed for the Dashboard to be ever expanding.  As the site grows or we add new features on, we can create widgets that use simplified versions of those features and allow you to place those on your Dashboard.  So rather than finding all the things you have interest with on the site individually, you can look to one page to see everything at once and then decide where you’d like to go from there.

It’s a 100% completely customizable, ever expanding, access point that we think you’ll really enjoy using and will be a large improvement to IHM in general.

(Also, because I can’t hold secrets in very well, expect to see some cool features created because we wanted to have some powerful starting widgets.  Some widgets will be extremely powerful and have many features while others will just provide basic information to you.)

EDIT: For those with suggestions as to widgets they’d like to see on the dashboard, please post them as comments to this post.