Optimizing your Home Assistant dashboards

A wall-mounted Home Assistant dashboard is a different animal from the one you poke at on your phone. It's glanceable, always on, and shared by the whole household. The best ones disappear into the wall and just work. Here's what we've learned—building Dashie and living with these screens every day—about making them genuinely good.

Design for the glance, not the deep dive

A kiosk dashboard is read from across the room, in passing. Optimize for the three-second glance: what does someone standing six feet away actually need—the time, the weather, who's home, what's next on the calendar? Push the long-tail controls a tap deeper rather than cramming everything onto one screen.

• One job per view. A "home" overview, a controls view, a calendar view—not all three fighting for the same pixels.
• Size for distance. Bigger type, fewer items, more whitespace than a phone layout.
• Lead with information, not switches. Most glances are read-only. Status first, controls second.

Make it fast—and keep it fast

Always-on screens are unforgiving of slow loads and memory creep. A few things that matter more than they should:

• Watch the card count. Heavy cards—live camera feeds, big history graphs, map cards—are the expensive ones. Put them where they earn their keep, not on every view.
• Be deliberate about cameras. Live streams are the single biggest resource draw on a wall tablet. Show them on demand or on a trigger rather than streaming 24/7.
• Mind long-lived memory. A tablet that never reboots will surface any leak eventually. A nightly refresh is a cheap insurance policy.

Reduce the maintenance tax

The dashboard you have to babysit is the one you stop using. Favor patterns that don't break every time you add a device:

• Name and area entities well—it pays off in both dashboards and voice. (Name the entity "TV" and assign it the area "Family Room," rather than baking the room into the entity name.)
• Template once, reuse everywhere instead of hand-copying cards per room.
• Decide what's worth surfacing. Not every sensor deserves a tile. Curate.

Respect the hardware it lives on

A dashboard is only as good as the screen it runs on. Wall tablets bring their own concerns—screen burn-in, batteries cooking on a permanent charger, motion-wake, and locking the thing down so a guest doesn't accidentally exit to the launcher. This is squarely where a purpose-built kiosk app earns its place over a raw browser.

Start small, iterate

The best dashboards aren't designed in one sitting—they're tuned over weeks based on what your household actually glances at. Ship a simple version, watch how people use it, and cut what nobody looks at. Subtraction is the most underrated dashboard skill.