The ZURBlog is where we discuss interaction design and strategy.

We're letting the cat out of the bag, folks. We're redesigning, and in a big way. We're overhauling our website, blog, extranet, and much more. As part of our redesign process, we needed to rethink how we approach our work and internal projects in a way that better facilicates activity. We needed a dashboard.

So we built one! From a late night team brainstorm before heading to Red Robin, Dashboard was born. Great name, huh? We think so. Our Dashboard acts as the pulse on everything we do on the Web, and is a unique look at our team's activities. Twitter feeds, del.icio.us links, ZURBword.com searches, and activity on the blog are all routed through Dashboard.

Act and React

From Dashboard, we do everything. We tweet, we link, we blog, we monitor, we create. Your typical dashboard is a jumping off point, a way to quickly and easily access data and actions from a central page. Here we've blown that model out to encompass several tools and sets of data. We're looking to keep an eye on everything we do so we can act, and more importantly, react.

For instance, when I finish this blog post, it'll show up in our Activity feed. The rest of the team will see my post and be able to jump right in to add their own comments and engage those of our readers. Just like a blog post, we're also notified of things like newsletter sign ups. Those numbers are encouraging and offer a unique look at our business that we otherwise wouldn't have.

As a side note, we considered e-mail updates for blog comments, but we decided against it in the end. Instead of e-mail updates for our team, we have a central repository for everything ZURB. This keeps our head in the game while we work, but still keeps us apprised of how we're doing. Also, e-mail is a bottleneck and acts like cold storage more than an heat lamp for activity.

The Big (Little) Reveal

Here's just a taste of what's to come. It's small, but we're keeping a lid on most of it for now. We're only a few weeks in, but is this baby handy.

Those blue boxes across the top are actual business stats, but for now, we're hush-hush on which is which. So why the blue boxes right in our faces? Well, as I mentioned earlier, the point of any great dashboard is to serve as a stepping stone to something else. For us, this means easy access to key drivers of our business, like blog comments and tweets between team members.

Most importantly though, we're encouraged to do more. Having important metrics and a single point of distribution for all our online content means we're activity engaged in moving content. Really, we're on top of it.