When I was a child, I loved to play spaceship pilot. I piled up old carton boxes and decorated the interiors to look like a spaceship cockpit. With a marker, I drew a spaceship dashboard on the inside of the boxes, and I remember playing in there for hours.
The thing that's special about the design of cockpits and spaceship dashboard is that they need to provide an overview and control over the whole spaceship, in very limited space. I think the same applies to application dashboards. A dashboard should provide the user with an overview and a sense of the overall status of what's going on.
In this chapter, we will create such a dashboard for our task management application. We will make use of the open source charting library Chartist to create good looking, responsive charts and provide an overview of open tasks and project statuses:
