A wallboard has one design constraint every other screen in the building doesn’t: nobody scrolls it. A dashboard on a monitor can run long, a report can page, a phone can be tapped for more. A TV mounted above a line gets exactly the space it has, and whatever doesn’t fit either shrinks to fit or gets left off by the screen itself, not by whoever built the board guessing at font sizes months ago.
Ten tile types, one job each
A board is built from a fixed set of tiles, and each one answers a single question instead of trying to cover several. A KPI tile shows one OEE-family number, availability, performance, quality, OEE itself, TEEP, with a trend arrow and a vs-target chip. A Number tile shows one live measurement with its unit and a sparkline. A Graph tile plots one to four measurements over a window, with optional control limits. Status shows running, stopped, or starved blocks per machine, sized to read from across an aisle. Rank shows a top-N list, worst downtime, top scrap reasons. Text or clock-shift renders a header or the current shift name and time. Process Flow, Cell Map, and Facility Map each render a live version of a routing or floor-plan view at TV legibility. Downtime Cost shows today’s or this shift’s lost minutes, priced at each machine’s own resolved rate, for a line, a plant, or the whole site.
That list stays short. Every addition to it has been a specific, argued decision, not a default “add a tile type” reflex, and the discipline pays off on the floor. A crew learns what each tile shape means once, and every board they walk past afterward reads the same way.
Type that scales as one system, not tile by tile
Every piece of text inside a tile, headline, title, axis label, badge, runs through the same font-size step so the whole tile grows in lockstep when you pick a larger size in the config drawer. The headline value gets its own larger multiplier on top of that so the one number a crew actually needs to read from the far end of the aisle is always the biggest thing on the tile, bigger than its own label, bigger than the unit next to it. That’s a deliberate pick, not a default: a smaller shop tried a few different ratios side by side before settling on one combination and shipping it everywhere, so a KPI tile and a Number tile scale the same way instead of each tile type inventing its own type hierarchy.
Color that only turns on when the state is real
A tile’s edge accent is gray by default. It only turns green, amber, or red when the metric it’s tracking actually enters that state, never as a decorative default someone picked to make the board look finished. A Status tile with every machine running shows a green summary state. One with some machines stale or reporting no data, and none actually down, shows gray, because “unknown” and “down” are different facts and a wallboard that conflates them trains a crew to stop trusting the color the one time it matters.
Content fits the tile, the tile never gets the last word
Every list-shaped tile, Status’s machine pills, Rank’s ranked rows, measures its own available space before deciding what to show, rather than trusting a font-size formula to guess correctly. It renders one real row off-screen first, measures its actual height, and divides that into the tile’s real available height to get an exact row count. A Status tile that can’t fit every machine at full size shrinks its pills toward a measured floor, never smaller than a state label needs to stay fully readable, and once even that floor can’t fit everyone, it trims the list and says “and 3 more” instead of dropping machines with no sign they exist. A Rank tile takes the opposite approach on the same problem: it never shrinks a row below its natural size, it just renders fewer whole rows, because a ranked list cut off mid-row, a fragment of a machine name overlapping the row above it, reads as broken in a way a shorter list never does.
This matters more on a wallboard than almost anywhere else in the product, because nobody’s going to scroll to see what got cut. The alternative to measuring the real box is a tile that clips without warning, showing the top sliver of a status pill or truncating a downtime reason mid-word, which is worse than showing fewer rows in plain sight.
A number’s age is part of the number
A wallboard that shows a live figure has to also show when it stopped being live. A Number tile whose signal has gone stale doesn’t keep displaying the last value it received as if nothing changed, it shows the age next to the number, “as of 12 minutes ago,” so a crew glancing up mid-shift can tell the difference between a current reading and a frozen one. A tile with no data at all renders dashed values instead of a blank space or a zero, because a zero on a wallboard reads as a real measurement, and a machine that hasn’t reported anything is a different fact than a machine that measured zero.
The shift tile and the downtime-cost window
Two tile types carry a shift concept directly. A clock-shift text tile shows the current shift’s name alongside the time, “LINE 2, C SHIFT, 14:32,” so a crew doesn’t need to do math on a wall clock to know which shift’s numbers they’re looking at. The Downtime Cost tile can scope to today or to the current shift specifically, a choice that changes what the dollar figure actually means, today’s total loss across a full 24 hours reads very differently than this shift’s loss so far. A board built for a single-shift line usually wants the shift-scoped window, so the number resets at shift change instead of carrying yesterday’s losses into a fresh crew’s first hour.
Design it in Preview before it ever reaches the floor
The board editor’s Preview mode renders exactly what the TV will show, at true size, nothing clickable, with a dashed line marking the board’s real edge. Check a new board in Preview before walking it to the floor, and catch a clipped row there instead of in front of the crew it’s meant for. If an older board somehow runs past its own edge, the editor doesn’t resize your tiles on its own to fix it. It says so, and shrinks what’s below the line to fit once it actually renders on the TV.
Quick recap
- Ten tile types, each answering one question. A short, deliberate list, not an open menu.
- Every piece of text in a tile scales on one shared font step, with the headline value carrying an extra multiplier so it always leads.
- Accent color stays gray until the metric it tracks actually enters that state. No decorative color, ever.
- List tiles measure their own real space before deciding what fits, Status shrinks pills toward a floor and says “and N more,” Rank renders fewer whole rows instead of a partial one.
- A stale number shows its own age. No data shows dashed values. Neither pretends to be a live reading.
- The clock-shift tile and the Downtime Cost tile’s shift-scoped window keep a board clear about which shift its numbers belong to.