Industrial Robot Schedule Tracker Dashboard

Experiment

We hoped to create a dashboard that allowed people to track the status and schedules of their industrial robots.

Key Takeaways

• • The ease of use and intuitive design of Lovable allows teams to quickly prototype and deploy industrial robot dashboards, significantly reducing time-to-market and development complexity.
• • The importance of a streamlined user interface is emphasized, as simplifying the landing page and enhancing navigation contributes to a better user experience, making information more accessible and actionable.
• • Surprise elements, such as automatic generation of relevant metrics (e.g., machine utilization), show that advanced tools can uncover insights that improve decision-making processes without requiring extensive technical knowledge.
• • While Lovable democratizes web app development, potential users should be aware of limitations regarding code complexity, which may require programming expertise to troubleshoot effectively.
• • This platform allows teams to redirect focus from technical development to high-value activities like sales and strategic planning, enhancing overall operational efficiency in a fast-paced tech environment.

App Builders Used

Lovable! It was incredibly easy to use and we found ourselves with very appealing options. If this was a project we were working on longer-term, I'd imagine that we could synthesize these and continue using Lovable to edit and prompt this, allowing us to focus on sales, hiring, and fundraising as opposed to app development.

Prompting Strategies

Since this is about experimentation and I don't have something in particular I'm looking for, I used a much more iterative test and modify approach. Here are some of my prompts: "instead of making a landing page, can you please make a dashboard prototype of what this app would look like? I am open to your interpretation, but please make it easy to use! Can you show me a preview of the scheduler page? I want it to be clickable from the side navigation bar. Dashboard can still be the home page For every navigation page, can you create a sample for me? On the scheduling page, I want a more detailed breakdown of each robot, the times they are running with the ability to filter on any dependencies or robot types."

Project Outcomes

What Worked Well

Lovable is incredibly easy to use and deploy websites! As much as I have loved using Github over the years, Lovable was only a couple of clicks away from deploying a web app. The barriers to entry for creating a site like this are lower than ever.

What Didn't Work Well

I ran into a lot of technical issues with the code being too long, needing refactoring, etc. I used their suggested prompts to fix it, but if I had less programming expertise, this might have been a more intimidating hurdle for me.

Surprising Findings

I'm surprised at how quickly Lovable can create technical dashboards with relevant information that I didn't even think about (like machine utilization).

Moving Forward

Experimentation can be done much faster; you can focus on other tasks as opposed to spending many engineering hours building the dashboard; instead, you can spend that time building an effective product or leveraging your employees for more people-facing roles.

Full Project Site

Accompanying Landing Page

Website Enhancements

This is the prompt I made for enhancements: "Can you please make the following changes? * Add relevant imagery of robots in industrial applications and icons * Make the UI for the landing page simpler and easier to read, all links should be functional and lead to their own respective landing pages. Do your best to fill each landing page with information you think is relevant for the specific tab! * Show an example dashboard somewhere on the homepage and talk about how intuitive and easy-to-use this product will be"

Hypothesis Testing and AI Possibilities

Generative AI has sped this process up SIGNIFICANTLY. I remember learning how to do web development from a young age and even the simplistic UI on this website and connecting/testing all of these pages together would've taken me hours. It's amazing what can be done with Generative AI in a matter of minutes now. These enhancements allow me to create a better page quickly that could be shared with potential customers as part of customer discovery research for feedback, for example.

Project Outcomes

What Worked Well

ChatGPT was very responsive to my prompting, so whenever I requested these changes it (generally) did its best to implement those. I was particularly impressed with how quickly it generated the other four pages for the landing page; essentially, I could make a full website within minutes now, with almost no coding knowledge.

What Didn't Work Well

The imagery I requested and cleaner UI was not done by ChatGPT in the enhancement. If I was working on this project longer-term, I would make more specific requests to ChatGPT on how to adjust things (i.e. use this font, this color scheme, and maybe even provide example photos to use).

Surprising Findings

It surprised me how easily and quickly it generated HTML code. When I suggested making all of the pages functional, it even gave me instructions on how to connect the pages along with their filenames (i.e. put these files in the same folder)

Full ChatGPT Generated Landing Page