Tender's newly refined dashboard listings

We’ve been adding a lot of fine feature polish on Tender recently – things that on their own don’t qualify as a “feature” but add up to the whole of the product experience. One of the larger pieces of that polish was redesigning the discussion listing in the dashboard context.

The old dashboard context

It suffered from some problems:

1. There is a lot of hidden functionality, but none of it was apparent until you hovered over select portions of the listing. It just wasn’t intuitive.

2. State icons were not very well defined and made it difficult to scan the list.

3. Low information density. There’s a lot of information we have that we weren’t showing to you.

The new dashboard context

Admittedly, the new screen is busier which I’m not a fan of, but after using this screen myself for a few days, I’m happy with the functionality and information density trade-offs. Some of the bigger points:

1. Bulk edit – You can now check many discussions and resolve, open, add to queue and so on.

2. We’ve added the number of people watching the discussion to the right hand side (this is the number of unique users who have posted to the thread). It’s a good gauge of popularity and isn’t influenced by lengthy back-and-forth discussions.

3. The state icons have been merged with the checkboxes and are much clearer. The gearbox dropdown on the right hand side is a lot clearer too – inviting you to see what’s below (rather than making you guess that you could hover over an ‘Actions’ label).

4. More information that matters – you’ll see that the date has been replaced with how old a discussion is. This is obvious, and I’m not sure why it took this long to change it. The dates are also color coded to how old they are, as they get older, they get darker and bolder, signaling that you should probably take a look.

All in all, I’m really happy with these updates. I am positive some people will not like them (especially at first glance, without using it for a while). But over time I think it’ll grow on you and feel natural.