Dashboard's ineffectiveness

October 10, 2007 / Filed under: Dashboard, Usability

A while ago I talked about using OS X Dashboard to reduce dependence on the browser. The Dashboard offers a simple, at-a-glance view of important information, in the form of "widgets."

Since that time, I've grown increasingly frustrated with Dashboard's "lag time" whenever I switch to it. Unless you've accessed Dashboard recently (ie: in the past hour or so), you'll have to wait while each individual widget loads itself. The whole idea is to have "information at your fingertips," but the "lag time" makes it almost useless. I don't want to wait five or ten seconds for everything to load - I want it instantly.

In most cases, it's just quicker to use the browser, which is already open and running.

Comments/Mentions

# Andy at 10/10/2007 8:30 am cst

I'm eagerly anticipating Apple's rollout of widgets for iPhone. Installing supported widgets for OS X and iPhone should be easy. For example I love the weather and stock ticker iPhone applications. Over wi-fi they take just seconds to load up live data, and with Edge that data is always available even if retrieved slightly slower, which makes the idea of depending on it more palatable. By the way, pulling up Dashboard on my G4 iBook with 1.5GB RAM was much faster than a friend's G3 iBook. Maybe you are do for a hardware upgrade?

# Matt Thommes at 10/10/2007 8:46 am cst

Andy, the RAM thing could be an issue, sure. But I'm inclined to think it has to do more with how many widgets you have present on your Dashboard, and when was the last time you opened Dashboard.

I find if I go a few days without accessing Dashboard, it takes a really long time to load, ie: about 10 or 15 seconds. (That's a long time in "internet land.")

However, if I am frequently accessing Dashboard throughout the day (every hour or so), obviously it feels a bit "peppier."

I'm also thinking that individual widgets can cause a lag if they load slower, ie: they're retrieving more data.

I'm at the conclusion that Dashboard, however useful it seems, simply doesn't scale well.

# Andy at 10/10/2007 3:10 pm cst

AIR would have an advantage here. I would expect the embedded SQLite database could store web service call results locally, then periodically synchronize or allow a user to synchronize manually. That way users would just wait for presentation, not acquisition of data across the wire. Someone should invent that, oh wait they have, Konfabulator/Yahoo Widgets. But I think the current Appple iPhone widgets since they are controlled by Apple, I'll bet Apple has a lot of say over how fast the user experience is, such as knowing what the hardware on the back-end is.

That was a lot of babble. Your point and my point is that user experience speed is extremely important if not the most important part of the widgets, and perhaps Dashboard should limit the number, or take other measures, to improve the user experience.