The dashboard looked fine on your laptop. Then it went up on the wall, and nobody stopped to read it.
Digital signage dashboards run in two directions. One is the admin panel you schedule your screens from. The other is the live reporting view on the screen itself.
Every screen I design for, I ask what someone glances at from six feet away in two seconds. A dashboard is the hardest test of that. The person who built it has only ever seen it a foot from their face.
Here is how to design one people read, which numbers deserve the space, and what breaks once it runs all day.
A digital signage dashboard means two different things
Both meanings land here, so start with the difference.
The admin dashboard you manage screens from
This is the web app you log into. You build playlists, set schedules, and push changes without walking over to the screen. Think of it as the control room for every display you run.
It matters more than you expect once you pass one screen. Updating three screens by hand is annoying. Updating twelve is a job nobody wants. A good one groups screens by location, brand, or use case. Then you change all of them at once.
You will spend far more time here than your audience spends looking at the screen. Judge it on how fast you can make a small change on a Tuesday.
The reporting dashboard you put on the screen
This is the one you came here for. Business intelligence dashboards from Power BI, Tableau, or Google Sheets, rendered on a TV so your team sees the numbers without opening anything.
It sounds simple. Paste a link, point a screen at it, done. The hard part arrives afterwards. The view was designed for a browser tab, not a wall. It needs a login your screen cannot give it. And nobody notices when it quietly stops updating.
Those three problems are the rest of this article. Design, metric choice, and reliability. Get them right and the screen earns its place. Get them wrong and you have an expensive screensaver.
Design your dashboard for six feet away, not six inches
A dashboard is signage, and signage has a viewing distance.
The glance test: three numbers, two seconds
Stand where your team stands. Look for two seconds, look away, and say what the screen told you. If you cannot, there are too many numbers on it. Three headline metrics is the ceiling.
I've seen a lot of digital signage that looks like a PowerPoint slide got stretched onto a TV. Dashboards are the worst offenders, because the tool that built them was made for a laptop.
Type size and contrast that survive a room
Your headline figures need to be far bigger than the tool's default. Axis labels and legends rarely read at distance, so remove them. Light grey on white vanishes under office lighting, and so do thin chart lines. Check from the far wall.
Why a laptop dashboard fails on a TV
Reporting tools render for someone seated at arm's length with a mouse. Small type, too many panels, hover states a TV cannot show. Build a separate view for the screen. Juuno's Screen Zones give the dashboard part of the display and the rest to announcements.
Pick metrics people can actually act on
Your dashboard fails the moment it shows numbers nobody owns. Gallup found in 2025 that only 47% of employees strongly agree they know what is expected of them at work. A sharp screen narrows that gap. A cluttered one widens it.
Build it for one team, not the whole company
A screen serving sales, support, and ops at once serves none of them. Pick the team standing nearest to it. If another team needs different numbers, that is a second slide, not four more panels.
Put a target next to every number
A number with no reference point is not information. 97 leads means nothing until yesterday's figure sits beside it. Give every metric a target or a comparison period.
Cut the metric nobody reacts to
If a figure has sat there a month and nothing changed because of it, it is wallpaper. Ask your team which number they checked last week, and what they did next.
"It's the easiest 75% margin I've ever sold. It bundles into a retainer my clients already pay me, and they never even see the dashboard." — Hexxon Villa, Founder, Hexx Design
What breaks when a live dashboard runs on a TV
Nobody sells you the part where your screen shows a login page on Monday morning.
Logins, timeouts, and the public link problem
Your reporting dashboard probably sits behind a login. That leaves two bad options. A public share link puts business data on a URL anyone can open. Staying signed in on the device drops out when the session expires. The fix is signage software that holds authentication on the player, like Juuno's Secure Dashboards app on the $9 Growth plan.
Your player decides whether it stays up
A TV's built-in browser can run a dashboard. It is also the worst case for one, because the screen has to stay up all day. Use a dedicated player instead. Across the Juuno platform, 1 in 5 screens run on Amazon Fire TV.
Refresh rates and the stale number
A dashboard that stopped updating looks exactly like one that works. Check how often your source refreshes, and put a last-updated timestamp on it. Nobody walks past a wall and hits refresh.
Where dashboards earn their screen time
Here are five smart spaces to place a digital signage dashboard.
Offices: sales, project progress, and ticket volume
KPI dashboards on office screens work best with deal closures and open tickets. Both move during the day, and both belong to someone who can act on them.
Put the screen where people already stop. A kitchen area, a lift lobby, the wall behind the standing desks. A screen in a corridor gets walked past, not read.
The quiet benefit is fewer status updates. When the number is on the wall, nobody has to ask for it in Slack.
Restaurants: menus that change with the shift
Breakfast, lunch, and dinner boards that switch themselves. Your staff should never be swapping a board at 11am while a queue builds.
The same screen can carry the figures your team cares about. Covers so far today. Average spend. Prep times during a rush.
Point that one at the pass rather than the dining room. Guests get the menu. Your kitchen gets the numbers.
Schools: attendance, schedules, and student recognition
Attendance, exam timetables, and recent achievements. Hallways and libraries are the obvious spots, and both catch a captive audience between lessons.
Recognition is the part worth planning properly. A name on a screen travels further than a name in a newsletter nobody opens.
Keep the schedule board separate from the celebration board. One gets checked in a hurry. The other gets read while waiting.
Retail: what is selling, while it is still selling
Top sellers, promotion performance, and foot traffic. This one belongs in the back office rather than the shop floor.
The point is a decision your team can make the same day. Move a product to the front table. Push the item with the better margin. Send someone to the till before a queue turns into a walkout.
A weekly report tells you what happened. A screen tells you while you can still change it.
Warehouses: stock levels and late shipment alerts
Pick rates, stock levels, and late shipments. A screen near the loading dock beats a printed sheet that goes stale by mid morning.
Choose the numbers that trigger movement. A late shipment alert sends someone to a pallet. A stock level sends someone to a shelf.
Keep the count low here especially. People read these screens while walking, carrying something, in a hurry.
Only 8% of Juuno businesses use time-based scheduling. Your morning and afternoon shifts rarely want the same numbers.
Fi Smart Collars runs live leaderboards across 117 screens in more than 40 venues, each showing only the dogs that visit that park. At the first five locations, Fi tracked a 44 to 135 times increase in repeat visits. Real-time data changes behaviour when it is personal and current. Read the Fi case study.
"I have literally seen with my own eyes a guy who was in second place, he came back, brought his dog, just so his dog could move into first place." — Vanessa Lopez, Retail & Partnerships Lead, Fi Smart Collars
How to get a dashboard on screen this afternoon
Pick your player. Fire TV, Signage Stick, Chromecast, or Raspberry Pi. Browser playback suits a test.
Connect your dashboard. Paste the URL or embed code. The HTML guide has the details.
Build the playlist. Rotate the dashboard with announcements.
Mount the screen. Clear sightlines, stable connection.
Launch it. Check at 9am, then at 4pm.
When I'm reviewing a screen someone built, I'm thinking about whether it still makes sense at 2pm on a Tuesday.
What Juuno costs for a dashboard screen
If your dashboard needs a login, you want Secure Dashboards on the Growth plan at $9 per screen. If it is a public URL or a Google Sheet, Business at $5 covers it. See how that compares across 20 signage platforms.
Try Juuno, the simplest, most affordable digital signage solution for small businesses.
Digital signage dashboards FAQs
Can I display a Power BI or Google Sheets dashboard on a TV?
Yes. Both publish to a web URL, and signage software displays that URL on screen. Looker Studio, Tableau, and most data visualization tools work the same way. If the dashboard needs a login, use a signage app that stores credentials on the player.
Do I need a media player, or will my smart TV browser work?
A smart TV browser will run a TV dashboard, and it is fine for a trial. For a screen running all day, a dedicated player is steadier. Fire TV, the Amazon Signage Stick, Chromecast, and Raspberry Pi handle continuous playback better.
How many metrics should go on one dashboard screen?
Three headline numbers. Beyond that people stop reading, because a screen gets glanced at rather than studied. If you need more, split them across two slides. Each number should carry a target so it means something at a glance.
What is the difference between a dashboard and digital signage analytics?
A dashboard displays your business data on a screen. Digital signage analytics measures the screens themselves: uptime, playback, and content performance. One is what you show. The other tells you if anyone saw it.
Ready to get started? Juuno is the simplest, easiest, and most affordable digital signage software for small businesses. Try Juuno today.
Mike Hill is CEO and Co-founder of Juuno, a digital signage platform used across 20,000+ screens in 128 countries. Before Juuno, he spent over a decade running advertising agencies, including as CEO. Juuno is his third software product. He's hands-on across product, development, and customer support, and has worked directly with thousands of businesses on their digital signage setups.