Designing CEO dashboards for 500-inch screens and 5-inch phones

When I started on executive dashboards for the CEOs of mining businesses, the first surprise was not the data. It was the screen. These dashboards are reviewed with heads of department on boardroom displays of 350 to 500 inches, a mini movie screen, and the same CEO checks the same numbers on a phone between meetings.

Most dashboard advice assumes a laptop. Here is what changes when it does not.

Start with the questions, not the charts

A CEO dashboard is not a reporting tool. It is a decision tool. Before drawing anything, I sat with subject-matter experts and stakeholders to understand which KPIs actually drive conversations: production capacity, mine health, incidents, required output, finance, and for copper, sales and production across cathode, rod, precious metals and by-products.

The first deliverables were deliberately rough: low-fidelity wireframes for month-to-date and year-to-date views. Lo-fi is not a formality. It lets executives argue about what is on the screen before anyone gets attached to how it looks.

Status first, detail on demand

The biggest design decision came in the second version. Instead of a wall of equal charts, we grouped every KPI by its status: needs attention, watch list and healthy. I called it the helicopter view.

A CEO should see the exceptions in the first three seconds, not after reading every chart.

From there, the same data is available at three densities:

• Card view for a quick glance across all KPIs
• Grid view for comparing related numbers side by side
• Detailed KPI view for the deep dive, with trends and breakdowns

Because each person cares about different numbers, a view-customisation screen lets users choose which KPIs to show or hide.

Designing for the wall

A 500-inch screen is not just a big laptop. People sit at different distances, lighting varies, and several people read the same screen at once. A few rules helped:

1. Go dark for the big screen. The v2.0 dark theme reduced glare in the room and made status colours carry the meaning.
2. Size for the back row. Labels, numbers and trend arrows were sized so they still read from across the table.
3. One idea per card. Each card answers a single question: are we on plan, and which way is it moving?
4. Maps where geography matters. Primary production uses a geo map, because location is part of the story.

Designing for the palm

The mobile version is not a shrunken wall. On a phone, the dashboard becomes a list of expandable month-to-date and year-to-date summaries with clear up and down indicators. The phone is for checking, not exploring, so the layout optimises for the two or three numbers someone needs right now.

The trap is designing the desktop and "making it responsive" at the end. I designed the large screen and the phone in parallel, from the same KPI definitions, so neither felt like an afterthought.

Review with the people who decide

Every iteration was reviewed with heads of department and the CEOs themselves, and the designs were signed off that way. Those sessions were the most valuable part of the project. Executives are direct: if a number is hard to find, they will tell you in the first minute.

What I would tell another designer

• Write down the decisions the dashboard supports before you choose a single chart type.
• Lead with exceptions. Healthy KPIs can be quiet.
• Offer density levels instead of cramming everything into one view.
• Design the extremes of screen size together, from one source of truth.
• Put the real decision makers in the review loop early.

Dashboards for executives are less about data visualisation and more about attention. Spend theirs carefully.