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Designing an admin panel
What is a good admin panel design and is it worth your time?
They live in the deepest and darkest corners of the internet. Always in the background. Never seen by the majority of normal users.
No, I’m not talking about porn or the dark web.
I’m talking about admin panels and dashboards.
These days, almost every website has some type of configuration tool in the background. Whether it is a small personal blog created with a content management system (CMS) or the biggest websites out there that are managed by massive companies with thousands of employees.
So what are the design challenges when it comes to admin panels and should you invest your time creating them?
What makes a good admin panel?
When you decide that you either want to or have to create an admin panel, how do you go about designing one? While there are a lot of similarities between a good website and a good admin panel design, there is a very fundamental difference when it comes to the goal of a dashboard.
A lot of the modern internet is created with the goal in mind of keeping the user on a website for as long as possible. Social media apps have addictive designs because the business model of these companies rewards higher user visiting durations. The longer a user remains on the site, the more ads can be delivered, the more articles can be read, and the likelihood of buying something increases.
When creating an admin panel, however, your goal should be the opposite: Create it in a way so the user can achieve his tasks as fast as possible. Users don’t want to waste time managing something.
Clean & Functional Design
The most important design aspect of an admin panel is a very clean and well-structured design. Just present the data and available options in the cleanest way possible. There is no reason to add any extra design fluff in an admin panel, save those for the actual website.
