New Dashboard page enhances workplace awareness

In the hectic rush of day-to-day work, employees need constant awareness of what is going on across their workplace, projects or areas of interest. For Refinder, this meant to provide a central landing page  (https://www.getrefinder.com/home/), which furnishes quick access to a highly informative and insightful snapshot of ones momentous business activities.

 



What is workplace awareness?

Companies, large and small, are complex organisms driven by people, who want to get things done. Work progresses in thousand different ways by activities of groups, individuals or machines, through fellow co-workers and in contacts with customers, partners or suppliers, at places nearby or remote. However, one person can only do one thing at the time. So a good portion of a companies doings is dedicated to the coordination of all contributors. Coordination affords the understanding of the temporal, spatial, social and activity context of the work being done. Striving to accomplish such understanding is what "awareness" stands for.

Starting the work-day in the morning, coming back from a meeting,  emerging from an hour long session of undisturbed work,  are typical situations with a need to catch up quickly with what happened in-between to establish the baseline for ongoing coordination.

Refinder´s redesigned landing page is one means to obtain better workplace awareness. It provides the view into the most recent activities inside of a users collaborative network.

Timeline view of activities

The center stage of the page is dedicated to a timeline view of the activities across your collections. Activities comprise the addition, modification or removal of Things, comments or likes to Things or notifications about somebody who got invited, joined or left a collection.  All entries give direct access to the collection view, thing detail view, file access or an external source, e.g. a bookmark. The timeline is subdivided by collections, starting with the one with the most recent changes.  including a timestamp, followed by the collections with previous changes.

Recent collections

The column to the left of the timeline gives an overview of up to seven collections with recent changes. New collections can be created on the fly through the "Create new collection" button.

Trending people

To the right of the timeline find icons of the most recent contributors. Playfully called "the facepile" by Refinder staff, these icons indicate on mouse-over the activity state of the depicted Refinder users.

Tip of the day

Underneath of the "Trending people" section, the "Tip of the Day" box highlights Refinder features and links to related posts on the Refinder blog.

Summary

With the enhanced design of it´s core landing page, Refinder offers one further type of activity stream, which focuses on the display of the most recent activities and changes in a users account. Providing different types of activity streams  - like Refinder does - is an essential requirement for state-of-the art collaboration platforms. The new design of the "Dashboard" page intends, that users rapidly grasp alterations in their collaborative setup and receive appropriate status updates on content changes.

Tags: