Theme

The dashboard

The "is everything okay?" page. Most days it should tell you nothing is wrong.

Alerts, only when there's something to say

Nothing renders when nothing is wrong. There's no all-clear panel, because a permanent green box at the top of a page is clutter that teaches people to stop reading the top of the page. The bell in the page header appears only when there is something in it. If you see it, act on it.

Four things can raise an alert:

Seen, and dismissed

The bell sits to the left of the figures in the page header, with a count on the corner. It pulses until you open it, then stays lit but quiet — a problem you've already read should stop shouting without disappearing.

Every alert links to the page that answers it, and carries a Dismiss link that clears it off the list. Dismissing means "I've dealt with this much of it": the alert stays gone while the number holds or falls, and comes back on its own if it grows. Dismissing "3 emails failed to send" will not bury the same alert at 300. If the problem clears entirely and later returns, it returns as a new alert — unseen, and pulsing again.

List growth

The size of your list day by day over the last 90 days — people added, minus people who unsubscribed — with the running total of unsubscribes as a second line.

It's a running total rather than a count of daily joins, because the question is whether the list is growing and a daily bar chart answers a noisier one. The line starts wherever your list already was, not at zero.

The rest of it

The dashboard updates itself as the queue drains — you don't need to reload it to watch a broadcast go out.