Redesigning the Dashboard

[sviridovt]

While working on a new fuel model I wanted to add some kind of a graph to the dashboard to show the movement in fuel prices, however I didn't just want to tack it on. I wanted it to be a well thought out part of the dashboard. The problem of course is that the dashboard itself is not incredibly well thought out. In fact it hasn't been touched since the initial release of the sim, when it was hastily created just days before public release just to not have a blank home page, the whole process probably took about 5-10 minutes. It wasn't meant to be a permanent design, just more of a temporary patch until something more robust could be designed. I have thought about updating it from time to time (including a customizable card based system) but it was just never a high enough priority. Until today, I wanted to show a mockup of a dashboard design that I'm considering, walk y'all through it and get some feedback. 

(that said, please do ignore some of the graphical issues, if the scheduler has not made it clear, I am no graphic designer)

 

The Info Bar: 

The idea with the top bar is to provide a quick bird eye view into the key metrics for your airline, the long term vision here is that you can click on a given metric to get a modal to show you more details about whatever it is you clicked on. 

The Graph Module:

The graph module will show you graphs related to your key financial metrics, you can click on the different metrics on the side to get a different graph. 

Notification Pane: 

The main core of the dashboard is the notification pane, the idea here is that it should give you a prioritized list of information of things that you can take an action on immediately. The idea here is that it would also replace the current mail system which is another under-developed component of the sim. Within the notification pane you would have 3 different notification types: Warnings, which will always appear at the top and represent the most important actions that need to be taken immediately (examples include aircraft with expiring leases, flights cancelled due to maintenance related issues when that's implemented etc.), info panels which will present currently actionable but not necessarily urgent issues, and advisory panels that present information that do not necessarily require any action but are useful to keep and eye on. 

Forum Panel: 

One of the goals I have is to increase engagement on the forum, I really value having feedback and want to have more people involved in the planning process (hence the point of these posts). While we have a decent player count, very few engage in the community channels like Discord or the Forums. The hope is that by having the forum panel on the dashboard this can promote engagement on the forum. 

Competitive Landscape:

The ultimate goal of the sim is to promote player engagement with each other and the broader sim world, to this end I aim to introduce the competitive landscape panel which will show you what your competitors are doing as it relates to your airline. The current plan is to have the panel display when one of your competitors updates anything on one of the routes that you operate (like increasing capacity, or starting a competing service), as well as other information that other players are doing relevant to your airline. 

Airline Widget: For the competitive landscape cards and other places in the sim, it's not always ideal to have the full 250x50 airline logo to display, for this purpose I aim to introduce the airline widget as another logo type, by default it will be the first 50 pixels of the 250x50 airline logo, though I aim to introduce this as one of the first Patreon exclusive features whereby Patreon supporters would be able to upload a custom widget. Monetization strategy is something that I've struggled with, mostly due to my deep-seated opposition to having any Patreon features that would provide an unfair advantage, yet the fact is that ads on their own are not enough to sustain the sim and I'm currently paying for it out of pocket hence I'm hoping that introducing some Patreon exclusive features for graphical customization that do not affect game play is a way to attract more support. 

 

Please let me know if you have any feedback or other suggestions on reinventing the dashboard. Something I've missed or you'd like to have on the dashboard? Let me know! 

[Marco1887]

Hi,

I like most of the new design, but the current route profit section looks better to me than the possible new one. Maybe it is just the coloring.

Edited September 5, 2023 by Marco1887

[sviridovt]

4 hours ago, Marco1887 said:

Hi,

I like most of the new design, but the current route profit section looks better to me than the possible new one. Maybe it is just the coloring.

Yeah, the exact aesthetics are still a WIP. I do think I'll have it line up top to bottom rather than side by side just just to be more small screen and mobile friendly (I realize the sim as a whole is not particularly mobile friendly, and while full support is not in the plans yet I am trying to be more conscious of it in my decision making) but the aesthetics will improve. As far as information goes, would there be anything else that you'd like to see added (or added as an option, I am considering making it an airline config that you can put different kinds of information as the advisory panel). Thanks! 

[OpenBeta]

Maybe have different formats people can individually choose from, like a line chart, a bar graph, a guiding tool to help newer players into advanced stuff

[sviridovt]

On 9/9/2023 at 10:59 PM, OpenBeta said:

Maybe have different formats people can individually choose from, like a line chart, a bar graph, a guiding tool to help newer players into advanced stuff

Yeah the original vision some time ago had something like that, will see about doing something like that long term but for now keeping it simple. 

[AndrzejLKS]

I agree, I think we should have formats people can individually choose from. Personally, I think the route planner page needs a rework. Would love to see a much more easier way to plan routes rather than having to type the time in and worry about turnaround time & continuity.

[sviridovt]

On 9/27/2023 at 8:08 AM, AndrzejSzymanski said:

I agree, I think we should have formats people can individually choose from. Personally, I think the route planner page needs a rework. Would love to see a much more easier way to plan routes rather than having to type the time in and worry about turnaround time & continuity.

Yeah, the route scheduler is a page I wanted to redesign since inception as it wasn't meant to be permanent. It's a priority but also something that I really don't want to touch 😛

[emp]

In my opinion, I believe the dashboard should prominently feature an interactive map displaying airline routes. This map would allow users to visualize all available routes simultaneously, providing a clear overview. Additionally, the dashboard should include a table presenting route data, specifically focusing on load factors. For instance, it could highlight the 5 to 8 routes with the lowest load factors. This information can be invaluable for immediate improvements in airline operations.

I've recently started using this dashboard, and I hope my suggestions contribute to its continuous improvement, making it the best tool for its users. 🥰

[sviridovt]

On 11/7/2023 at 7:51 PM, emp said:

In my opinion, I believe the dashboard should prominently feature an interactive map displaying airline routes. This map would allow users to visualize all available routes simultaneously, providing a clear overview. Additionally, the dashboard should include a table presenting route data, specifically focusing on load factors. For instance, it could highlight the 5 to 8 routes with the lowest load factors. This information can be invaluable for immediate improvements in airline operations.

I've recently started using this dashboard, and I hope my suggestions contribute to its continuous improvement, making it the best tool for its users. 🥰

I probably won't add a route map to the dashboard as I would prefer to keep the dashboard as a 'quick summary' of sorts rather than omnibus of all the information (you can go on your airline page or flights page to get that info), though I do think having options to decide what metric top 3 best/worst routes are shown (by default this is revenue currently) would be a useful feature. It should also not be particularly difficult thing to add, since the APIs I'm working on should already implement these filters (I've been working on adding/relying more on reusable APIs both to speed up development as well as to move away from server side rendering which is a major driver of latency) 

[sviridovt]

Update on the new dashboard

 

I haven't had quite the time to work on it as I had hoped due to work commitments, but have made some progress. For one, I have made a decision to move away from the 3  pane approach and instead have 2 equal panes with the left pane being the informational pane, showing cards that will show up all the time including valuation graph, fuel prices, top/worst flights etc. with the long term plan to support user customization on which cards there are and where they appear. The left pane, or the notification pane will show notification cards, such as alerts about issues with your airline (plane leases expiring, aircraft running out of cycles etc.), aircraft deliveries, as well as competitive outlook when any of your competitors update prices, add/remove flights etc. This notification system will also replace the current in-game messaging mechanic thus deprecating that system. 

On mobile and smaller screens the two panes will appear as tabs instead, thus furthering support for mobile users which is a priority for me. 

The other use of the new dashboard is the introduction of React into the game as part of an effort to refresh the UI and add interactivity to the sim as well as increase performance. At present, the entire UI is processed server side, which results in some issues such as high latency on certain pages that require a lot of data, as well as limitations on the interactivity we can do (we do leverage APIs to enable interactivity in some places such as the seat map generator or lately in dynamic tables, but currently this is very much an exception rather than the rule). This is a quite dated approach and one I hope to replace. The long term plan here is to completely sever the front end and the back end, however with the amount of pages we have, with most requiring some amount of new APIs this is significant amount of work. Instead of stopping working on new features in favor of dedicating significant effort to purely front end work (or as I would call it, hell), in the interim I am redesigning pages as I go  to embed react pages as components within existing site. Since the dashboard is the first such page, there is a lot of additional work to set everything up, especially since I want to be cautious about having all of this new work in a separate package such that whenever the full migration does happen, I can just import it into the new UI rather than needing to put in a lot of effort migrating everything over. I'm happy to say that much of this pre-requisite work is completed and I can now start working on the actual dashboard.