Your portal’s dashboard is the first thing a user sees when they login, so you want to make the most of it right? Your dashboard is a great place for all of your most important (and exciting) updates and is a great place for you to build community for your team. Here are our top tips for how to make the most of your dashboard.
Give a shout out
Add the shout outs widget to your dashboard to celebrate your team on their milestones! You can choose to celebrate birthdays, work anniversaries, or any date-based event that can be gathered from a user’s profile. The widget can be customised in a number of ways, including whether or not to allow likes and comments, date displays, which brand colours to use, etc. The shout outs widget adds that personal touch and allows the whole company to celebrate each team member on those special days.
Links to frequently used pages and sites
The quick links dashboard widget allows you to provide links to important or frequently used pages right on your dash. You can add internal links to pages in your Ideagen Op Central portal (like a leave request form) or external links to other systems you use (perhaps Hubspot or Deputy). These links can be displayed in multiple different ways; icon view, list view and thumbnail view, allowing you to tailor the quick links to your taste. Quick links make using the system even easier and certainly brighten up your dash!
Update those news articles
PSA: if you still have the default news article from Ideagen Op Central on your dash, you’re not using one of the best features of our dashboard. News articles are a really powerful way of sharing fun and important things to your entire network. For example, some clients share their latest marketing efforts, store openings, updates on delays to shipping and more. Again, this is one of the first things your team is going to see when they log in so it's a great way to get those important messages across. You can also set your news articles as required reading, but heed my warning: don’t set every article as required reading! If you’re posting 5 articles a week and setting them all as required reading, what was once a fun and engaging part of the dashboard, is now an annoyance to your team. Make smart use of the required reading for the important messages, and leave the fun news as optional to read.
Make a statement!
Use the rich media content widget to make a bold statement on your dashboard. While the news articles show a snippet of the article and give you the option to read on, the rich media widget allows you to add it all in plain view. If you have something particularly exciting (like an upcoming event) or particularly important (like how to use the system), you might want to add that in as rich media instead of a news article or an item on the calendar. This widget stands out among the rest of your dash and you can customise it however you like with text, videos, pictures, etc.
Create different dashboards
“What? Different dashboards!?” Yes, different dashboards! You can create different dashboards based on user roles which allows you to better curate content and personalise the dashboard to your team’s interests and needs. For example, you can create a dashboard specifically for your customer service team who will want to quickly view their roster and their training performance when they login, and then a separate dashboard for head office who might want news articles and the calendar widget because that may be more important to them. Whatever is best and most important for a specific role, can be tailored to them.
Now that you have my top tips for optimising your Ideagen Op Central dashboard, go out and make it the best it can be! And speak to the team over at support if you need any help!