Case study
Commander's Update Dashboard
An operations dashboard prototype that replaces static briefing slides with a browsable, update-friendly view of location, timeline, and mission data.
Purpose
An operations dashboard prototype that replaces static briefing slides with a browsable, update-friendly view of location, timeline, and mission data.
The problem with briefing products
Staff pour huge amounts of time into briefings that are out of date by the time they are delivered. They gather the data, build the slides, give the brief, and then do it all again next cycle. Nothing carries over, and every update is a rebuild from scratch.
The Commander's Update Dashboard goes after the root cause, which is that briefing products are built around the moment of delivery instead of the long cycle of keeping them current.
What the prototype does
The dashboard keeps the data separate from the way it is shown.
Operational locations, mission timelines, and status fields live as structured data. The dashboard turns that data into something you can move around in, with a map for spatial context, a timeline for sequencing, and a status panel for where things stand right now. When something changes, you change it once and every view picks it up.
Briefing becomes a matter of reading the current state rather than rebuilding it.
Putting the map and timeline together is the biggest departure from slides. A static slide forces a choice between showing the location, the timeline, or the status, and rarely all three in a way you can use. A dashboard can hold all three at once, which is closer to how a commander thinks about a mission in the first place.
Visual hierarchy under time pressure drove most of the layout. The goal was to make the single most important thing findable in under thirty seconds, which leads somewhere very different from a slide deck built for a presenter with a pointer.
Current state
The prototype shows the core display idea and layout, with the map and timeline working together. From here the work is reducing how much effort an update takes through better input structure, and trying out a configurable view layer for different briefing audiences. What differentiates this system from traditional dashboards is how AI is used to inject unstructured data (email chains, slides, free-text, etc) and transform it into a useable format for dashboard update.
Related