Industry Dashboards

I’ve spent a lot of time designing API driven KPI style dashboards for my industrial operations and given the industry changes coming as detailed in the Summer 2012 CSM7 minutes, I want to share my designs to (hopefully) inspire people for upcoming Winter expansion (I wonder if CCP’ers read this blog).

My mission statement with these was to use a clean, elegant format to give a high level display into my industry operations while using Eve icons and market prices. I should be able to tell the materials and price/profit for items at a glance without referring to other menus, applications, or looking up historical prices.

Industry Jobs

The below shot is active industry jobs. I want to know what is being used, who is using it, current and future ME/PE/Copy numbers, and a pretty display for the job progress.

Another dashboard that I created was capital jobs only. Since these jobs were so long, I wanted to be able to see them progress on a calendar. This has allowed me to keep idle blueprints busy and schedule large-scale builds since capital jobs require large amounts of minerals.

Though the current Eve client does display industry jobs, I find it to be inelegant.

The information displayed is all text, almost like I was reading a database table. Also, I am constantly switching between filter options as the window does not remember my past settings.

PI

When I experimented with supplementing my POS network with PI items, I wanted to be able to display my PI network. I needed to know who owned the item, what is was producing, the output quantity, and how much ISK/day that operation was making.

Additionally, I did some work with the database table for PI items (wonderful self-referencing table) to show me what items up the PI T0 to T3 tree I can currently make given what I am extracting. The page ends up being quite long as it displays all tiers so I cropped this shot after T2. The red marks next to the T1 items mean that I don’t have the T1 items in stock so I can’t make the resultant T2 item.

This is a great example of my ‘high level’ approach. I can now easily answer the question of “can I make Robotics?”. No, I need to be making this at T1 and this at T2. I don’t have to spend time looking at blueprints and their requirements — no additional pages or reference material.

Tech 2 Production

Tech 2 manufacturing can get quite complicated. I was spending a lot of time checking what I had in stock, the build requirements, and final costs. This page gives me the ability to simply move a blueprint from the left column (stock) to the right (build queue) and it queries the database to display everything that I need to make that item.

Multiple blueprints can be added to the queue and materials are aggregated together. This allowed me to place all my blueprints in a queue and create a shopping list of things I need to create the run.

Capital Production

The same story continues for capital ships. I can select my BPO/BPC, the ME level, the character producing it, and the production station. When the location is picked the bottom panes pull from the assets and tell me what I have in stock and what I need in order to complete the job.

Industry Advancement

I want to see a reduction in the amount of clicks and an increase in the amount of user feedback and intelligence given to the user. The displays should not just be a simple static display. They should be more dynamic — pull from your inventory when you select a production system and tell me what I need, display a build quote that doesn’t require me to have all the items or know their build requirements, and use the new Inferno universal market price for items.