Getting a clear overview of your projects with Trello
Trello is a big name in the collaborative project management space. Ideal for teams working in KANBAN or AGILE, it’s most often used to create KANBAN boards that offer up the ability to quickly and easily get an understanding of how a project is progressing at a glance. Trello boards also enable you to keep your team in the loop on the progress of a project with a straight-forward drag n’ drop system, meaning you can drag a ticket from an “In Progress” list, to your “Done” list, and it’ll update in real-time for everybody viewing that board.
However, Trello isn’t just useful for KANBAN boards. With a Premium plan, you can get access to a few different views — including a Dashboard view. With this, you can view metrics like how many tickets have been marked complete this month, how many tickets are assigned to each member, and how many tickets have which labels (which can be really helpful in seeing how many tickets are labelled “Stuck” or “Blocked”, for instance). All of this information can help you and your team identify bottlenecks or problem areas, and keep your efficiency as high as possible.
Trello and Fugo TV Dashboards
In the spirit of collaboration, displaying your Trello dashboards or KANBAN boards on your workplace TV screens and digital signage opens some exciting possibilities. You can keep your team informed on their progress in the projects they’re working on by displaying their Trello board on a screen in their office or smash your monthly retrospective meeting by showing a Trello Dashboard on the meeting room TV to highlight the metrics you’re discussing.
The TV Dashboards feature inside Fugo CMS allows you to display a wide variety of third-party dashboards - including Trello dashboards - on your workplace TV screens or digital signage. Getting it set up is a piece of cake, and displaying your dashboard on an existing screen can be done in a matter of minutes.
Most importantly, though, the TV Dashboards feature takes your security seriously. Rather than storing your login details for Trello on an unsecured external device that can be stolen or lost, or creating a URL that displays your dashboard (that anybody online can access), Fugo records your login steps, encrypts them and sends them to a private Cloud server that then repeats them remotely, and securely sends a screenshot of your dashboard back to Fugo CMS every time you need to fetch the most up-to-date view. This means your details are kept safe and your business intelligence and project information is never exposed to the wider internet or to people looking to snoop on you.
Best Practices for using Trello with Fugo CMS
We’re going to get into how to hook up the Fugo TV Dashboards feature with your Trello dashboard in just a second, but before we do that let’s go over some recommendations and best practices that we think you should follow when connecting any third-party dashboard provider with Fugo TV Dashboards:
1. Create a service account:
We've worked hard to develop the TV dashboards feature so that your sensitive data is completely secure. But as an extra precaution, we highly recommend using a 'least privileged' service account when setting up your dashboards - this is usually an account that has read-only permissions for the dashboards you want to display on your screen(s.) You can read more about how to set up a service account with Google here.
2. Start with your dashboard URL
It's often the case that you can navigate directly to your target dashboard's URL when creating a new dashboard in Fugo. This will require you to log in, and then you’ll be redirected back to your destination. This is the quickest and most reliable journey you can make in Fugo Dashboards as it cuts out unnecessary steps in your journey.
3. Search for your dashboard
Most dashboard services have search capabilities. Instead of clicking through multiple menus, you can get to your target content quicker and more reliably by searching for it. We recommend searching the full name of the content you want to display, as partial search terms may return more items you'll have to sift through.
Connect your screens to a Fugo account
2.1 Log into your Fugo Account. If you don’t have an account yet, you can start your 14-day free trial here.
Note: TV Dashboards are a part of Fugo's Business Plan. During your free trial, you can create one dashboard. To create any more, you will need to upgrade your plan.
2.2 Make sure your screen(s) are connected to Fugo CMS. If you haven’t connected your screen(s) yet, you can find the instructions for that here.
Create a new dashboard
2.3 Click Dashboards in the top navigation bar to go to your Dashboard library. If you have not created any dashboards yet, this page will be empty.
2.4 Click Create Dashboard to get started. This will take you to the New Dashboard recorder page where you will follow the instructions to capture and preview your dashboard before publishing it to screen.
2.5 Next, you’re going to want to enter the URL you use to log in to Trello (I’m using www.trello.com here) and click Go. Fugo will open a new incognito window using the URL you entered in step 2.5. If you’re using a URL different from the one I’m using in this example, you can skip the next step (as you should end up directly at the Trello login screen).
2.6 If this is your first time creating a TV dashboard, a popup guiding you on how to configure your Chrome browser to allow the Fugo recorder to run in incognito mode will appear. You can find our instructions for allowing incognito mode here. If this is not your first time, you can skip this step.
2.7 For the URL I’m using in this example, it brings me to the Trello homepage. Click Log In.
2.8 Once you’re at the login screen, enter your account email and password and log in as usual.
2.9 Now that you’re logged in, you’ll be looking at your account home screen. From here, you can view all of your “Workspaces”, or dashboards. While you can pick your dashboard from this list, we would recommend searching for your dashboard using the search functionality in the top right. This is just an extra step to help guide the Fugo Recorder so that it can more easily locate the dashboard you want to display!
2.10 When you’re viewing the dashboard you’d like to display, click the Board dropdown from the top left, and select the Dashboard view.
2.11 From this screen, simply select “Capture Dashboard” in the bottom panel to let the Fugo Recorder know that you’ve reached the screen you want to display and stop the recording. Fugo will close the incognito window, and walk through the process it recorded to make sure it can access your dashboard as expected.
💡 You can also select Element Screenshot, the button to the right of the Capture Dashboard button, to allow you to select particular elements on the screen. This is useful in cutting out the UI of Trello, and only displaying your actual data.
2.12 You’ll see a loading screen while Fugo walks through your steps and fetches your dashboard for the first time - don’t worry if you don’t see your dashboard for a few minutes, it can take some time depending on the number of steps! Eventually, you will see your dashboard in the preview area.
2.13 Once your dashboard has appeared and you’re happy with how it looks, you can immediately send it to your workplace TV screens or digital signage by using the Publish button to open the Publishing popup. This allows you to add your dashboard into existing playlists or publish it directly to your TV screens. You can also click Save to save this for later, and come back to it.
💡 Note: a dashboard screenshot won’t be updated until it’s published to a currently active screen. In essence, our system does not capture dashboards that aren’t being viewed.
Tips and Tricks for your Trello Dashboard
Compiling your Trello board into a dashboard can be really helpful for keeping your teams in the know at a glance. Dashboards are great for collaborative project management and can empower your teams to make decisions and monitor their progress easily, especially when displayed on shared workplace TV screens. However, there are unique challenges that you might face when building a dashboard — particularly when you’re building it with a shared screen in mind. Let’s go over a few tips and tricks so that you can build your dashboards like a pro!
Make it easy to read. When you’re viewing a dashboard up-close on your own screen, you can afford to make it complicated and flashy. When you’re building a dashboard that will be viewed from across the room, at odd angles, or potentially on a smaller screen, you really need to communicate everything you can with the least effort possible. Use easy-to-read fonts, colors that don’t crash, and avoid pie charts if you can (they’re more difficult to read and glean useful insights from for decision-makers).
Declutter. When you’re putting your dashboard together, think about the information that really matters. It can be tempting to compile tonnes of different metrics and show a very complex dashboard full of numbers and graphs, but that might not help your team and might actually hinder them by overloading them with information. Instead, you should aim to display only the most crucial information and cut out the noise by removing anything that isn’t relevant. To go further, you should also aim to use as few decimal places as possible to keep your graphs and tables clear and easy to read.
Mix up your data. It can sometimes be difficult to contextualize information, especially when you’re working with a limited amount of on-screen real estate like when you’re building a clear, communicative, and concise dashboard for your team. To help combat this, you can include a mix of historic data and current data, which can help to immediately give a more full view of the data you’re looking at currently, as well as helping you and your team predict upcoming issues and identify bottlenecks.
If you’re looking for more specific help with Trello’s dashboard feature, they’ve written a post about it that can help guide you through creating a dashboard and gives you a few reasons that a dashboard can help leaders and project managers be more effective. You can read that article here.
Is there anything this guide hasn’t covered for you? If you have any further questions or any feedback on this guide, you can drop our support team an email at support@fugo.ai any time. They’re always happy to help!