2 ways to activate more from your dashboard

Founders, are you guilty of checking your SaaS product’s dashboard obsessively?

Refreshing MRR, signups, churn a dozen times a day. It's addictive, isn’t it. 

But are we also guilty of shipping a SaaS dashboard to our users that doesn't help them at all?

But are we also guilty of shipping a SaaS dashboard to our users that doesn't actually help them at all?

Your users don't want a better view of their problem, they want their problem gone. Just like a louder smoke alarm doesn't put out a fire, a fuller dashboard doesn’t solve your user’s problems. 

Open your dashboard and ask: what's the one decision this screen exists to drive? What does it make someone do? If you can't answer in a sentence, your dashboard isn’t as useful to your users as you think. 

Fix your dashboards in 2 steps

Fix your empty state

A new user's first screen is usually blank: a "0" with no context or next step. 

To users, that reads as broken, at the very moment someone's deciding if your product works for them. 

Give it one job: explain, prompt, or celebrate. Never just leave it empty.

✅ "You haven't connected a data source yet" 

❌ "No data"

or GitHub's ✅ "All caught up!"

Cut what's on screen to 5–8 metrics

People can hold about seven items in working memory at once. To your users, a 20-widget dashboard looks like homework they didn't sign up for, which will get closed and forgotten.

The instinct when a dashboard isn't landing is to add: another chart, another filter, another metric someone on the team swears is useful context. Resist it. Dashboard problems tend to get worse with more and better with less.

Once you've cut the list, give one number more visual weight than the rest. Make it bigger, bolder, first. A single number that stands out gets noticed and acted on far more than ten that all look equal.

Not sure which fix to start with? Look at exactly where people drop off. If most new users never come back after signup, that's probably an issue with your empty state. If they stick around but never go deeper, you’re overloading them with metrics. 

How to know it worked

Easy – test it. Show the new version to 5–10 people for five seconds, then ask what they'd do next. If roughly 8 out of 10 give the same answer, the fix worked. If they don't, you're not quite done yet.

Then you can track the real number for two weeks ⬇️

Your 7-day activation rate, the % of new signups who complete their first meaningful action. 

And see if it goes up. 🤞

Every Wednesday, Lumi co-founder Milosz runs a free Founder Hour. Bring your dashboard (or whichever screen is costing you users) and we'll pull it apart together.