· 6 min read
What makes a dashboard stick
Mobbin went through 2,108 dashboards from 536 apps and websites to figure out why a few of them stick and most don't. I wrote down the ones worth keeping, with the screens, so I have a reference that isn't a five minute video.
Dashboards are one of the most searched things on Mobbin. Tens of thousands of designers look them up every day, mostly web ones. Mobbin calls them the designer's dream selfie, because they're complex enough to show off and still fit in one screenshot.
Most of the 2,108 were fine. They had clear hierarchy, decent spacing and useful charts, and you'd forget them right after closing the tab, so I only kept the few that didn't feel that way.
The good ones tell you what the number means
Fey shows a stock's price chart with a short list of key indicators beside it, like whether the stock is beating the S&P 500 this year, how it's trading against analyst estimates and how fast earnings are expected to grow. Mobbin said the dashboards they kept coming back to were always one step ahead, and Fey was their first example, since the panel tells you what to do about the chart.
Fey on Mobbin
Origin does the same with a weekly recap and a daily market brief written in plain language. Runna turns your stats after a run into a highlight card that you can post straight to your Instagram story.
The memorable ones look like nothing else in the category
Shopify's Live View puts your store's visitors on a globe in real time, and each dot is someone browsing the store right now.
Shopify on Mobbin
Front shows your team's busiest times as a heat map where darker squares mean busier hours. Visitors is a web analytics tool, and most of those look busy, so a clean one stands out.
Front on Mobbin
Cake Equity put an actual birthday cake in the middle of its ownership donut chart. Mercury lets you play a game once you've paid all your bills, at the point where most apps would show you an empty table.
Cake Equity on Mobbin
Mobbin's take was that you can tell none of these came from a template, because someone clearly sat down and worked out how to make the data make sense to their users.
The first dashboard was a board for blocking horse poop
The word had nothing to do with data at first. Nearly 200 years ago a dashboard was a wooden board on the front of a horse carriage, and it stopped mud and horse poop from hitting the driver when the horse dashed forward. When cars replaced carriages, the dashboard became the place for signals.
Nearly 1 in 5 products on Mobbin open on their dashboard
If you're comparing Shopify with ten other platforms that do roughly the same thing, the dashboard does a lot of the convincing, because one screenshot shows what the product does, how you're doing and what to do next.
Shopify on Mobbin
Opal turns your screen time into an Instagram story
A lot of the ones that stood out to Mobbin were on mobile. Opal shows your screen time as story cards that you swipe through like an Instagram story, so your own data feels like content. Another Opal screen works out that at your current pace you'll spend 31 years of your life looking at your phone. Mobbin's point was that people share things that look this good, and a stat like that is pretty easy to send to a friend.
Orbit is a subscription tracker that puts your yearly total under a glowing planet, and Mobbin said it makes tracking subscriptions weirdly enjoyable.
Once you say "I closed my rings" you're not switching
Some products coin their own metric. Duolingo made streaks a thing, Oura gives you a readiness score, and an Apple Watch user might just say they closed their rings instead of saying they worked out for 30 minutes. Once people talk like that, they're very unlikely to move to another fitness tracker.
Oura on Mobbin
AI dashboards get about twice the saves on Mobbin
On Mobbin, AI dashboards get about twice the saves and exports of the average dashboard screen, so designers are clearly collecting them as references. Every dashboard eventually makes you ask why a number moved. AI is starting to answer that, sometimes with a single prompt under a chart and sometimes with a full chat panel next to your data, like Mixpanel's Spark and Pipedrive's AI reports.
Mixpanel on Mobbin
Pipedrive on Mobbin
Mobbin's test is whether you'd screenshot it
After all 2,108, the gut check Mobbin kept coming back to was "would I screenshot this, and why?"
All screens from Mobbin. Video credit: I Studied 2,108 Dashboards To See What Sticks by Mobbin. Follow them on Instagram and X. Used Mobbin MCP to pull images and LLMs to correct grammar and typos.