Zechub Dashboard Redesign

Redesigning Zechub's Web3 Dashboard The Past Lives project was about building a sanctuary, a digital archive of someone’s entire existence, created by people who are grieving, remembering, healing, or celebrating a life well lived.

The ZecHub Dashboard serves as the central information hub for the Zcash community, connecting users to network health, governance, and ecosystem activity. The existing dashboard suffered from information overload and an outdated presentation, hindering its effectiveness in supporting ZecHub's mission of building community, education, and investment tracking.

The legacy ZecHub Dashboard suffered from low discoverability and high cognitive load, resulting in a poor user experience.

Everything was presented in a flat, unhierarchical tab-style data dump; it was hard to tell important information from secondary details.

Users were struggling to find key information quickly.

It looked outdated, not what you would expect from a cutting-edge financial privacy tool.

To put it simply, all we wanted to do was:

Efficiency: Decrease the time to find critical information

Usability: Achieve a reasonable level of usability validated by positive qualitative feedback

Engagement: Increase weekly user engagement

Modernization: Establish a modern, credible Z Modern visual design identity

The design process began by challenging assumptions about how the Zcash community interacts with metrics.

Heuristic Evaluation: Identified severe usability issues related to consistency, error prevention, and recognition over recall.

Competitive Analysis: Analyzed two major data dashboards - Dune Analytics (for data density) and TradingView (for charting flexibility).

Light user feedback from the Zcash community

The most defining insight was that while the data was complex, the user needs were simple and varied:

Users wanted the most important information first, followed by the flexibility to explore deeper.

Prioritize: Collapse and restructure summary metrics

Customize: Let users build the dashboard in a way that matches their workflow

The new IA moved from a product-focused organization to a user action-driven framework.

Navigation Before (Product Centric)

Reduced cognitive load by focusing the primary navigation on the three core user actions, significantly simplifying the header.

Also renamed "dashboard" into "analytics".

The primary challenge was displaying tons of required data intuitively. The solution was to make the display of this data a feature, not a fixed constraint.

Solved information overload by grouping similar metrics and prioritizing summary data at the top.

The dashboard moved from unsorted and unscalable charts (BEFORE)

to clear hierarchy;

Creating groups that contained similar, related charts ALL AT ONCE helped users see related information without having to navigate between tabs.

Introduced a tooltip for each chart to assist Zechub community users who might require extra context.

Flexibility: Users can drag and drop graphs to reorder their dashboard.

Scalability: Users can adjust graph widths between full width (for detailed analysis) and half width.

Persistence: Users can save their custom views, addressing the varying needs for information to prioritize those identified in the research.

The current metric (e.g., Circulation)

A simple color-coded status change (green for positive change)

A small line chart (sparkline) showing 7 day history

Made the summary card section collapsible, prioritizing the most important data first(top 4). This also provides context without cluttering the main view.

The goal was to create a visual identity that felt trustworthy, technically sophisticated, and aligned with the Zcash ecosystem.

Color Palette: Dark theme as default, using deep dark blue backgrounds and high contrast typography.

Accents: Strategic use of gradients for primary buttons and status indicators to add a modern crypto-based flair and draw attention to key actions.

Interaction: Prioritized discoverability. Customize View and Load More actions remain visible.

The redesign was validated via testing within the Zcash community, specifically measuring critical task completion times.

Structure: Unordered list of metrics/charts

Aesthetics: Light, sparse, outdated

Interaction: Static view, requiring scrolling and hunting for data

Structure: Collapsed summary metrics at the top, followed by a customizable grid of detailed charts

Aesthetics: Dark, high contrast modern aesthetic with dynamic gradients

Interaction: Dynamic drag, drop, resize, and save custom views

The biggest challenge was the complex data integration required to intuitively display tons of highly technical and dynamic data points.

Solution: We employed the layered design strategy, grouping metrics logically (IA), applying components like the Sparkline Card for quick comprehension, and giving users control via Custom View.

My most valuable takeaway: For expert users dealing with complex data, simplicity must be the clean entry point, but flexibility must be the core feature that retains and empowers advanced users.