Why we changed the dashboard widgets in WC 2.1

WooCommerce 2.1 has a new dashboard widget which replaces the previous version’s “Right now”, sales, and recent order widgets. Some users will like this change, others may ‘miss’ the old widgets. In this post I’ll explain the reasoning behind the changes.

What we had

2.0 had a set of widgets, largely unchanged since 1.0.x:

• Right Now – Displayed counts of products and orders.
• Recent Orders – Listed several recent orders with status and some brief order info.

• 

  Sales – A flot powered chart showing sales per month.

The disadvantages to these

Our old widgets had disadvantages to users and to us as developers, including:

• More widgets make it harder to know where to look for the data you are after.
• More widgets are harder to maintain.
• If you wanted to see detailed reporting, you’d still need to go to the main reports page in admin – having an simplified, but large, sales report on the dashboard is unnecessary.

• 

  What good are recent orders when:

  1. you only really need to see the orders you need to action on and
  2. you can see the exact same information (with more detail) from the orders page itself (1 click away).
• The additional ‘Right Now’ items, excluding the processing orders count, is pretty useless information day to day. It isn’t something you need to see every login.
• Relying on the styling of ‘Right Now’ could cause future issues with styling.

Design decisions

We decided to, rather than duplicate functionality from other sections, link to the relevant sections from the widget.

We then narrowed down the key information that a shop owner would like to see upon login to:

• Stock levels requiring their attention
• A quick overview of sales
• Orders on-hold they will need to take action on
• Orders processing they need to take action on

Everything else could go.

The solution: One widget to rule them all

The end result was a single widget containing only the most useful data:

Sales now only shows your monthly grand total, and also has a little sparkline to the right showing any trends.

You then have your best seller, again with a bar chart sparkline should you wish to see if there is a trend for this item.

Then you have the most useful part; orders. On-hold and processing orders (which are the ones you need to take action on) have a count.

Finally you have counts for items low in stock and out of stock; these are the products you’ll probably need to action upon.

Each ‘section’ links through to the correct place in admin, so for instance, if you clicked on-hold orders, you’d be taken to the orders page with the on-hold filter enabled.

You’ll notice the styling has all been cleaned up, and the new widget is way more lightweight than the old three. I’m personally very happy with it and see it as a much needed improvement for 2.1.

What do you think? Was this the right choice?