Arduino Cloud — Dashboards Redesign

01

Context

Arduino Cloud is a powerful platform that enables users to connect, program, and monitor their IoT projects effortlessly.

Dashboards are the face of Arduino Cloud, the primary interface users interact with.

Yet, while the platform itself has evolved, the UX/UI of Dashboards had remained unchanged for years.

It was time to finally give them some well-deserved love.

The old Dashboards page: four small widgets — status, percentage, switch and pushbutton — beside a yellow sticky note explaining markdown formatting.

02

Goal

We needed to simplify the existing interface, reduce the complexity shown to users, while, at the same time, set a strong baseline for future scalability and evolution of the product.

Hotjar session feedback collected on the Dashboards area, shown as annotated comment cards.

Arduino forum threads about Dashboards and widgets, with user complaints highlighted.

03

Before & after

The old Dashboards UI: a teal top bar, an edit toolbar, and four widgets on a large empty canvas.

The redesigned Dashboards UI: a dense grid of value, switch, gauge and chart widgets with a floating selection toolbar and a warehouse floor plan.

04

Research

To reach our goal the first step has been to understand what could be improved and why.

Research was conducted on both new and recurring users, globally, on various levels:

Desk Research on previous Usability Reports
Task Analysis during on-going user testing
Hotjar Recordings and Heat maps analysis (≈700k sessions over the previous 6 months)
1 Expert review of the whole UJ (internal)
Benchmark on 4 main competitors
Shadowing on Arduino Forum (conversations about Dashboards or widgets)

The research toolkit: Hotjar, Usertesting.com, the Arduino forum, Google Analytics, Chorus and Backend BI.

A spreadsheet of Hotjar recordings tagged and scored during task analysis.

A heat map over the Dashboards top bar showing where users click most.

A second heat map of the same bar after the layout change, with clicks concentrated on fewer controls.

05

Evolution

After the research, we decided to focus on separating the 2 core moments of the user journey: building and interacting.

We reduced modalities from 4 to 2, also redesigning the switch interaction to improve its clarity & predictability.

Finally, we opted for a progressive disclosure approach:

In View mode, only widgets are visible
In Edit mode, a toolbar with two states was designed to be future-proof. Ready to be the home of more advanced actions as the product evolves.

Edit mode with the widget picker open, above View mode showing only the widgets on a clean canvas.

06

Validation

Our goal was to minimize distractions and deliver a quick, effective UX, while improving coherence with the new Cloud ecosystem.

Validation ran in two ways: an internal testing session, and a Hotjar survey using the CSAT framework with open-ended questions, to spot issues and collect real user feedback directly in the product.

This was the first structured satisfaction measurement for our product — it now serves as the baseline to track every future iteration against.

The CSAT survey result: an average score of 3.9 out of 5, surrounded by tagged positive open-ended answers and a distribution bar chart.

Arduino Cloud | Dashboards Redesign