The screen
Numbers alone aren't enough. How the number was arrived at, and what you can do about it, have to be right there.
One small panel. Dark theme, always on top, draggable, refreshing itself every five minutes. It pulls once on launch and then the timer takes over.
Three decisions live in it.
The reasoning goes on the screen
N/A cases are excluded from the progress denominator. And the fact that they are excluded is written on the widget, in one line.
Leave it off and someone asks why the denominator shrank since yesterday, and answering that costs far more than the line does. Worse, the person who had to ask reads that number half-doubting it from then on.
A tool that shows numbers has to show how the numbers were arrived at alongside them. It’s the most common dashboard failure: the arithmetic is right, the method is invisible, and the reader carries their own version of the arithmetic in their head — and stops trusting the tool the moment the two disagree.
It isn’t only for looking at
There are three buttons under the numbers — redeploy the report, send the notification, write a comment.
The comment box is there for a reason. When you’re looking at the widget and think “that needs another look,” having to open a different window means it doesn’t get done. Split the place you look from the place you act and half of it leaks out in between.
Same reason the report deploys from here. The person who knows the results just changed should already be sitting in front of the button that publishes them. “Saw the result → open another tab → find the deploy tool → run it” is four steps, and four-step jobs get postponed.
Where the ugliness was accepted
It’s WinForms. Rounded corners drawn by hand, separators drawn by hand, buttons built by hand — all things a web version would have given me in thirty minutes.
I took this route anyway because a web version goes behind a browser tab. The single design goal of this tool is “visible whether or not you meant to look,” and living in a browser fails that goal from the start.
When a technology choice fights the goal, the goal wins. The price is a screen that looks like 2009.