Product updates

Geckoboard mobile experience

When you’re away from your desk your business doesn’t stop. So today we’re thrilled to announce a new mobile experience that makes accessing smartphone-friendly dashboards a breeze no matter where you are and what device you’re using!

We want mobile dashboards to be awesome for everyone, and whilst our old iOS app went some way towards making this possible, keeping it updated with all the new features we’ve been releasing has been tough (plus we’ve always felt it kind of sucked that we didn’t support other mobile operating systems).

Well, today that changes.

Whether you’re using Android, iOS, Windows 10 or any other mobile OS we’re happy to say you can now access mobile-friendly dashboards that support all our visualizations, goals and status indicators directly from your smartphone’s home screen.

##Access through your browser and as an app

Our new mobile experience is what our developers like to call a “Progressive Web App”. Don’t worry if that means nothing to you - what will mean something to you is you can now load mobile-friendly dashboards on your device of choice simply by logging into Geckoboard in your mobile browser.

Once logged in, you’ll be able to browse all the dashboards on your account in all their glory, with all your widgets, goals, and status indicators intact.

Missing the panache of loading your dashboards directly from the home screen of your phone? You can save Geckoboard to your phone as if it were an app using these simple instructions for Android and iOS.

##What does this mean for the iOS app?

We will no longer be actively developing our native iOS app and we strongly recommend replacing the Geckoboard iOS app using the tutorial linked above to take advantage of all the good things we’re constantly releasing.

Spark a reaction with Status indicators, revised Goals and Celebrations!

Recently we launched Warnings to help call attention to poorly-performing numbers on your dashboard. But what about when things are going well?

Celebrating numbers that are hitting or exceeding expectations is a powerful way to engage your team with their metrics, recognise hard work and help everyone feel good about what they’re doing. That’s why this week we’re excited to announce a brand new feature called Status indicators and a revamp of our goals on number widgets, that together turn your dashboards into mighty motivational tools that get the most out of your team.

Flag when things are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ with Status indicators

Our new Status indicators allow you to call attention to a number when it is performing above expectations or performing poorly, ideal for those situations when you want the whole team to know a specific number is in a specific state.

Status indicators can be added to any* number widget by clicking the top right of the widget you want to call attention to. Set a Warning when the widget is above or below a certain number, and your widget will turn red - danger!

Set a value for Success when the widget is above or below a certain number and your widget will turn green - yay!

For some metrics (such as your support ticket backlog) you might even want to add both a Warning and a success state to encourage the team to keep a metric within a particular range.

Celebrate success with Celebrations and revamped Goals

We’ve redesigned Goals on our number widgets to create more of a feeling of progression as you edge closer towards your target - great for keeping a team motivated, particularly when working towards longer term objectives. In addition, we’ve given you more control over where your journey towards hitting a goal begins.

Before, your progression against a goal would be measured against zero - not very motivating if you’re trying to improve monthly revenue from $50k to $55k for example. Now though you can set any starting value you like, meaning your progression is more meaningful and much more engaging for your team.

But that’s not all. Hit a goal you’ve set on your number widget and your team will be rewarded with a new celebration animation that calls attention to all your hard work. A great way to recognise a win!

Status indicators, revamped Goals and Celebrations are rolling out this week! ***

Note: Status indicators now replace ‘less than / more than’ goals on some number widgets.

*Spreadsheets widgets currently unsupported, but we’ll roll this out very soon!

Avoid catastrophe with Warnings

Seeing your numbers up on a TV screen is the easiest way to keep an eye on what’s going on, but every once in a while there are moments when a team really need to pay attention to a particular number that’s not performing as well as you’d like.

Maybe marketing are coming close to exceeding their budget for a specific online ad campaign. Perhaps your support team’s response times are slow and putting you in danger of breaching your SLAs. Or possibly your sales team are underperforming in a particular area that urgently needs extra effort to avoid harming their pipeline of opportunities.

Whatever your ‘worst-case scenario’ might be, you can can now easily alert your team to poorly-performing numbers on your dashboard using Warnings.

Unlike Goals, which subtly highlight when a target has been met, Warnings make problematic metrics unmissable by turning the whole widget red when a specific value is reached.

Warnings can be added to any number widget on your dashboards. Simply click the three dots in the top right of a number widget and then Add warning to set a warning to trigger at a specific value.

Geckoboard Lite (beta)

Although Geckoboard is designed to be displayed on large screens and TVs, not everyone has the necessary hardware to use our screens feature in all its glory.

Often it makes sense to start displaying a dashboard using whatever devices you have already, such as the browser on a Smart TV, an old unused laptop or a Raspberry Pi, before investing in any more hardware. But occasionally these devices will display errors or crash as they don’t fully support the modern web technologies that make our dashboards look and feel so good.

That’s why we’re launching a beta of a new feature we’re calling Geckoboard Lite that brings the awesomeness of our dashboards to a whole new range of underpowered, under-supported devices.

If you’re looking to display your dashboard on a device or browser that doesn’t quite meet our recommended specs, you can now choose to activate Geckoboard Lite to reduce the chances of your dashboards looking less than perfect.

Simply click ‘Screens’ at the top of your account and toggle Geckoboard Lite on:

Once enabled, if we detect your browser isn’t powerful enough then we’ll send an easier-to-display version, otherwise the “standard” version of your dashboard will be displayed as normal.

What’s the difference? Aside from better performance, it’s unlikely you’ll see anything different, although some visualisations and advanced customisations aren’t supported in the beta quite yet.

Add titles to your TV-optimized dashboard

We’re excited to announce you can now add titles to your TV-Optimized dashboard to help your organize and communicate your metrics. This is a much-needed addition to our new design layout; if your dashboard is intended for the big screen and you haven’t yet tried our TV-Optimized features, now is the perfect time.

To create a title widget, first add a Text Widget and then resize it to a slim height. The font will become bigger, ensuring it is highly visible on your dashboard. To help better arrange your dashboard, we’ve also added more flexibility to the grid.

We’re confident that our new TV-Optimized layout will help you design your best-ever big-screen dashboard. To give it a go, add a new dashboard and ensure the “Optimize for TV Screen” toggle is switch on. If you want to try it out but don’t have a spare dashboard in your plan, reach out to us via the in-app chat and we’ll provide a free trial dashboard.

Store widgets for later

Designing the perfect TV dashboard takes some trial and error, but now it’s easier than ever to try out new metrics and iterate on your dashboard to see what works best for your team.

If you’re using our TV Dashboard Layout, you can now hide widgets from your finished dashboard without deleting them forever. To hide a widget, simply drag it to the area below your dashboard.

Now, even when your dashboard is full, you can still experiment and try new things. Your hidden widgets are still there if you need them - simply drag them back onto your dashboard when you want them to appear on your dashboard.

With TV Dashboards, less is often more – most teams can only handle a few key metrics at a time. So why not try hiding a couple of your widgets and seeing if it makes your dashboard more focused? If your team can’t live without them, they’re right there waiting.

TV Dashboard Layout (beta)

Displaying live dashboards on a TV is the best way to make sure important numbers don’t get missed, and at Geckoboard we want to make that process as quick and effortless as possible for you.

Today we’re releasing a new way of laying out your dashboard that makes it easier to create dashboards that work great on large screens. Our previous column-based layouts allow you to create dashboards for all kinds of devices, but TV Screen dashboards require special design considerations and it can be tricky to get that right.

So if your dashboard is destined for the big screen, then today’s update is for you.

Here’s how it helps:

See the whole picture

TV Dashboards present all your most important metrics on one screen, and now you can see the whole dashboard all the time in your browser, so you always know what it will look like when you get it set up on the big screen. No unwanted gaps or readability problems, ever.

A grid designed for TV

Dragging, dropping and resizing are now quicker and easier thanks to our new snapping grid, making dashboards faster to build with no chance of misalignment. It’s best to focus on a handful of key metrics, but if you do need to fit more metrics, you can toggle to our ‘Dense layout’ option in the ‘Customize Appearance’ panel.

You can try out our TV Dashboard Layout features right now by adding a new dashboard and ensuring the ‘Optimize layout for TV screens’ toggle is switched on. Are you at your dashboard limit but keen to try out this feature? Get in touch – we’ll hook you up with a temporary free dashboard to test it.

This feature is in Public Beta and active development – it’s polished and ready to use, but we’re continuing to improve it, so we’d love to hear your feedback. Did you manage to build your best-ever TV Dashboard? What else would make this feature even better? There are more improvements coming, so watch out for them.

NB: If your dashboard is mostly for viewing on a computer screen or mobile, you can continue to use the column layout, which provides more flexibility for non-TV layouts.

Pipedrive integration

Today we’re excited to announce a completely revamped Pipedrive integration! Our new integration has been rebuilt completely from the ground up to make it quick and easy to build a great-looking TV dashboard that keeps your sales team motivated and informed throughout the day.

• Want to celebrate how many new deals have been created today so far? Easy.
• Need a co-ordinated push to make more calls so you can hit your goal this month? Broadcast your targets vs your current performance in a few clicks.
• Fancy injecting some healthy competition to improve win rates? It takes seconds to display a leaderboard showing who on the team has closed the most deals this month.

Our powerful new integration makes it effortless to build a motivating sales dashboard with time-saving presets, easy-to-understand visualizations and powerful filters that give you complete control over all the finer details.

Log in to give the new integration a spin!

Zendesk Chat integration

Today we’re thrilled to launch our new Zendesk Chat integration that helps teams who use Chat have better awareness of what’s going on and where to focus their attention at any given time.

As with our other recent integrations, Zendesk Chat has a number of time-saving presets to help you get started, and a powerful set of filters to give you full control over the finer details.

Combined with our Zendesk Support and Talk integrations it’s now easy to get a full Omnichannel view of everything that’s going on across all your support channels!

Log in to give the new integration a spin (documentation), or read more about how it works in our Zendesk Chat announcement post!

Layout & display options for building better TV dashboards

Make your dashboards even easier to read on a large screen in just a click!

Your dashboards need to be easy to read and visible to everyone in your team if they’re going to be a successful driver for change in your business, and we know how frustrating it can be to have to squint or move closer to a screen just to read a widget title or label.

That’s why today we’re excited to launch a few small but high-impact changes that increase the readability of your dashboards.

Now, all new dashboards will benefit from having our new Large Font Mode applied by default. This new mode bumps up the size of important labels and text to make them much more legible from far away. In addition, lines that indicate trends (for example in our line charts and some versions of our number widgets) increase in thickness when Large Font Mode is activated to keep visualizations balanced.

Although new dashboards have Large Font Mode applied automatically, you can toggle this on or off within a new “Layout and display” section within your dashboard’s “Customize appearance” menu.

Today’s changes are part of a bigger project that’s focused on making it even quicker and easier to build excellent large screen dashboards. If you’re displaying dashboards on a screen and would like to test some of the new things we’re working on we’d love to run them past you to get your feedback. Start a chat with us the next time you log in and we’ll be in touch with further details!