Design Dashboards

Use this skill to critique, design, redesign, or specify dashboards as working instruments for decisions, not presentation graphics.

Open references/dashboard-design-principles.md before any critique, redesign, operational dashboard work, best-practice review, or spec where dashboard judgment matters. It is optional only for straightforward concept sketches that do not require chart, layout, Gestalt, perception, interaction, or visual-encoding reasoning.

Mode Selection

Choose the narrowest mode that fits the user's request.

If the request involves an operational, real-time, monitoring, queue, incident-response, or other response-oriented dashboard, first choose the normal mode by task, then also apply the Operational Dashboard workflow:

• existing operational dashboard critique: Mode 1 plus Operational Dashboard
• new real-time or operations dashboard: Mode 2 plus Operational Dashboard
• existing operations dashboard redesign: Mode 3 plus Operational Dashboard
• operational dashboard spec: Mode 4 plus Operational Dashboard

Mode 1: Dashboard Critique And Polish