Product updates

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!

Zendesk Chat integration (beta)

We’ve got Zendesk Support. We’ve got Zendesk Talk. What next? Well you requested it in droves so it was actually pretty obvious what we needed to build… A brand new Zendesk Chat integration!

It’s still under development, but we’ve opened up a beta so anyone with a Zendesk account and who’s using Chat can visualize chat volume, queue size, available agents, wait time metrics, and more, and bring performance metrics from across all your channels into one easy-to-understand view.

Click ‘Add widget’ and look out for Zendesk Chat to give it a spin. We’d love to get your feedback on how we can improve it!

Funnel visualization

We’ve released some updates to our funnel visualization to make it much more readable on large screens. From today you’ll notice funnel widgets in our Mixpanel and Salesforce integrations, as well as our legacy Custom Widgets, look a little different:

What’s new? To start with we’ve shifted labels to the left of the funnel, enabling the font size to be bumped up and longer labels to be accommodated more easily. We’ve also tidied up the way values are displayed to the right of the funnel to make them more legible from a distance. Finally, the visualization now scales to different sizes more gracefully, so you can add funnels to your dashboard without worrying about formatting issues.

It’s details like these that make a good dashboards great, and we can’t wait to share some more updates soon on how we’re making our TV dashboards the best out there!