# Wallboard mode > The dashboard is on a wall, ten feet away, with no mouse. - Canonical: https://patterns.konigi.com/dashboards/wallboard-mode - Group: Screenspace - Level: context - Status: published - Updated: September 10, 2026 - Also called: kiosk mode, TV mode, rotation --- ## Problem The dashboard someone designed at arm's length on a good monitor is now on a television across an open-plan office. Nobody will touch it, nobody will scroll it, and the people it is for will glance at it for a second at a time from ten feet away. ## Solution A distinct mode, not a resized page. Chrome removed, type scaled up, panel count cut hard, colour reduced to a resting state, and rotation between a small set of views if one screen cannot carry everything. The viewing distance changes every design constant. Text that reads at 60cm needs roughly three to four times the size at three metres. A twelve-panel grid becomes four. A legend with eight entries becomes unreadable, so series need direct labelling or need removing. Anything requiring hover is gone, since there is no pointer. Grafana handles the mechanics with kiosk mode, which strips navigation chrome, and playlists, which rotate a set of dashboards on a timer. Rotation is the standard answer to too much content, and it carries a real cost: a viewer glancing up sees whichever view happens to be showing, so the thing that most needs attention is visible only part of the time. Rotation is acceptable for awareness and unacceptable for anything anyone is expected to catch. Colour discipline matters more here than anywhere. ISA-101's approach—greys at rest, colour reserved for abnormal—was developed for exactly this situation, an operator watching a screen for a long shift who must notice the one thing that changed. A wallboard where six panels are always coloured has spent its entire signalling budget before anything goes wrong. The unglamorous failure is the physical one. Wall screens run for months, get left on a stale page after a reboot, and are frequently the wrong aspect ratio at the wrong brightness in a room with a window behind them. ## Use when A shared space needs shared awareness, the content is few enough to fit at distance, and someone is genuinely going to look at it. ## Don't use when Nobody in the room can act on it. A wallboard whose numbers belong to another team is decoration, and worse than decoration, because it consumes wall and trains people to ignore screens. ## Trade-offs Wallboard mode is a second design of the same content, and the second design is the one nobody maintains. It becomes ambient: present so constantly that it stops being seen, which is exactly the opposite of its purpose and takes months to become apparent. Rotation trades completeness for coverage. And a wallboard is a public artefact, so anything sensitive on it is visible to visitors, contractors and whoever walks past. ## Checklist - What is the actual viewing distance, and is the smallest type readable from there? - How many panels, and can each be understood in a one-second glance? - Is anything dependent on hover, scroll or click? - What fraction of the screen carries colour when everything is healthy? - If views rotate, what is the cost of missing the one that mattered? - Does the page recover on its own after a reboot or a network drop? - Is stale data obvious from ten feet, or does the page look fine when frozen? - What is the aspect ratio and brightness of the actual screen in the actual room? - Is anything on screen that shouldn't be seen by everyone who walks past? - Has anybody looked at it, from where people stand, in the last month? ## Compare **Grafana** provides the mechanics directly with kiosk mode and playlists, so the wallboard is the same dashboard with chrome removed, which is convenient and means the layout is rarely redesigned for the distance. **Datadog** offers TV mode with a similar stripping of chrome, and its tag-scoped pages make it easy to put the same layout on several screens scoped to different teams. **Netdata** is a poor fit by design, since per-second density is built for close inspection rather than distance, which is a useful reminder that not every dashboard has a wallboard version. **Public status pages** are the best-designed wallboards most people encounter, because they assume an unknown reader at an unknown distance and reduce accordingly. ## Related Grayscale with alerts is the colour discipline this pattern depends on. Header KPI strip is usually the only thing that survives the cut. Semantic status color carries the signal once colour appears. Dense small-multiple layout is the opposite treatment of the same content, for close expert reading. Freshness indicator matters most here, because nobody at a distance can tell a frozen page from a calm one. ## Examples ### Grafana (Grafana Labs) The reference implementation for panel grids, template variables, and stat panels; most other tools are defined by how they differ from it. **Where The Cool Dashboards Live / Chicago L Trains** — captured September 10, 2026, Grafana Play (signed out; no version string exposed). wallboard, sparse density, dark theme, wall. A live departures board for one platform, built out of stat panels against the CTA Train Tracker API, and it is the clearest wallboard in the gallery: four rows, type large enough to read across a concourse, no chrome inside the board and nothing to hover. The next train gets three times the height of the three behind it, which is the layout saying "start here" without a word of copy. The interesting problem is the colour. Pink, Green and Orange are the CTA's own line colours, inherited from the world outside the screen and already known to every rider—which is the best possible reason to use a palette. But the status chip beside them is also green when a train is on time, so on the second row "Cottage Grove" is green because it is the Green Line and "On Time" is green because it is on time, side by side, meaning two unrelated things. Hotspots in this capture: - [Wallboard mode](https://patterns.konigi.com/dashboards/wallboard-mode) *(this pattern)* — The next train, three times the height of the rest. Readable at ten feet with no pointer. - [Panel grid](https://patterns.konigi.com/dashboards/panel-grid) — Rows two to four at a third the size. Panel size is carrying the priority. - [Semantic status color](https://patterns.konigi.com/dashboards/semantic-status-color) — Green for on time, next to green for the Green Line. One hue, two unrelated jobs, one row. - [Freshness indicator](https://patterns.konigi.com/dashboards/freshness-indicator) — A countdown rather than a clock time, which is the right call and hides how old the feed is. - [Data table](https://patterns.konigi.com/dashboards/data-table) — The raw feed under the board, including the rgb string each line colour came from. ## Related patterns - [Grayscale with alerts](https://patterns.konigi.com/dashboards/grayscale-with-alerts) — If everything is colored, nothing is; normal should be gray. - [Header KPI strip](https://patterns.konigi.com/dashboards/header-kpi-strip) — The first row of the page has to answer 'is it okay' before the rest asks 'why'. - [Semantic status color](https://patterns.konigi.com/dashboards/semantic-status-color) — State has to be readable before the number is. - [Dense small-multiple layout](https://patterns.konigi.com/dashboards/dense-small-multiple-layout) — An expert wants everything on one screen and will trade legibility for it. - [Freshness indicator](https://patterns.konigi.com/dashboards/freshness-indicator) — The viewer is about to act on a number and doesn't know how old it is. ## Sources - [Grafana, Create and manage playlists](https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/visualizations/dashboards/create-manage-playlists/) - [ISA, ISA-101 Human-Machine Interfaces standard committee](https://www.isa.org/standards-and-publications/isa-standards/isa-standards-committees/isa101) - [W3C, WCAG 2.2—Non-text Contrast](https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Understanding/non-text-contrast.html) --- Screenshots on patterns.konigi.com are reproduced for commentary and criticism. 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