Admin interfaces are designed to provide control over complex systems. Often though, they evolve over time and get cluttered. What if we would re-think such interfaces from the ground up?
We all use cars every day and are accustomed to dashboards. For the last ten years though, there are more and more functions built into cars – ranging from temperature to entertainment systems. The resulted is a crowded dashboard with lots of added knobs, which can be very distracting.
What if we would re-think how to operate a car while on the road from the ground up? We found a video posted on YouTube that demonstrates one potential approach.
Starting from scratch in IT administration dashboards
At first sight this is very far-fetched and seems unrelated to Business Continuity. But, sometimes it is very helpful to look at a potential solution from an entirely different angle. In the ORBIT project we are in the process to interview admins who oversee systems. The question here is the same as in the car example above: How could we come up with a logical, uncluttered, easy to use admin interface?
Factors that would influence a new design, that we identified so far:
- Flexibility in adding new resources/servers
- Agnostic to internal or external resources
- Ability to create connections and visualize dependencies of resources
- Clear visual signaling if a resource is (a) working well, (b) experiencing rising load or capacity issues, (c) is unavailable.
- Support for disaster recovery in a visual way
- Support for disaster recovery by teams (re-producing what caused the outage)
- Reporting system health or issues to stakeholders (technical, management)
Most interfaces today are not designed for this. Which is why – as part of the media use case in ORBIT – we are currently setting out on identifying the elements that would be usable for a better interface to oversee complex IT set-ups. It will be iterative work, based on interaction with users from the field.
Work will start with sketches, then moves on to wireframes and a demonstrator to explore and validate new approaches.
Image Source Flickr




