Do you need to display special information about your commuter program to your users? An easy way to do so is via a custom widget on the user dashboard.
Custom dashboard widgets can be applied system-wide, or for users of a specific primary network.
Custom dashboard widgets can contain several different types of content, all of which can be linked to internal or external pages:
- Basic buttons or groups of buttons
- Cards with an icon and text and/or button
- Graphic boxes or banners
The RideAmigos user dashboard is separated into two columns, a wide column, and a narrow column. Typically wider banner-style widgets work best in the wide column whereas wide, square, or tall widgets can all work well in the narrow column. Click on any of the examples below for inspiration:
Button or Card-style Requirements
RideAmigos can easily create a button or card-style widget based on your preferred text, links, and supplied icons or graphics.
In general, the more information you can provide, including exactly where on the dashboard you would like the widget to appear, the more easily we can accommodate your request.
Graphical Widget Guidelines
While RideAmigos doesn’t offer graphic design services for widgets we can usually make use of graphics you provide. Here are some general guidelines you can share with your graphic designer:
Dashboard widgets are responsive and will resize depending on the user’s specific device and browser. To ensure best-possible display quality we recommend submitting graphical widgets that are at least twice (2x) the pixel density listed here.
The default display dimensions of the user dashboard columns are approximately 750px wide (max) for the wide column and 336px wide (max) for the narrow column.
A full-width widget would be ~1126px wide (max), but depending on your site’s widget layout we find such full-width top bars often don’t work well, given that the Commute Tracker dashboard widget that is typically at the top of the narrow column bumps up above the top line, as you can see in the examples.
The height of graphical widgets is really up to you and how much you want to displace other content on your users’ dashboards. For example, taller aspect ratio widgets on the wide column could cause additional scrolling to be necessary to see the trip logging or My Commute pane.
Whatever height you want can be accommodated, but in general, we suggest no taller than a 2:1 ratio for the wider column and anywhere between 2:1 and 1:2 for the narrower column, depending on content.
You may also find it useful to direct your designer to review the examples on this page to get an idea of how their designs will look in production.
Note on Mobile-Friendly Designs
Users viewing their dashboard on mobile devices or other small screens will see scaled-down versions of graphical content.
For small displays, button-style widgets or squarer, right-column graphics tend to fare best, since graphical banner-style widgets can shrink down to almost being illegible.