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Expert Interview
January 15, 2026  ·  14 min read

Home Assistant Dashboard Design: Building a Control Center That Works

With Daniel Hartman — Home Assistant Core Contributor, Former UX Designer at Google, Author of The Lovelace Blueprint

Most Home Assistant dashboards look like someone dumped every entity card onto a single page and called it done. The result: a control panel that's harder to use than the individual apps it replaced. Daniel Hartman has spent six years fixing exactly this problem — first as a UX designer at Google, now as one of Home Assistant's most active dashboard contributors.

We sat down with Daniel to talk about the principles behind dashboards your family will actually use. Not dashboards that impress Reddit — dashboards that let your spouse turn off the lights without calling you. Here's his framework.

Philosophy
Q: What's the single biggest mistake people make when building their first Home Assistant dashboard?
Daniel
They try to put everything on one screen. Every light, every sensor, every camera — all crammed onto a single view. It looks comprehensive for about five minutes, then becomes completely unusable. A good dashboard shows only what you need in the moment. Everything else stays one tap away, not staring you in the face.
Q: You've said a dashboard should feel like a cockpit, not a catalog. What does that mean in practice?
Daniel
A cockpit gives a pilot exactly what they need to fly — altitude, speed, heading — nothing more. A catalog shows you everything available and lets you browse. Your Home Assistant dashboard should be a cockpit. Every element should be actionable. Tap a light, it toggles. Slide a thermostat, it adjusts. If a card just displays information with no action, it probably doesn't belong on your main view.
Q: How do you decide what makes the cut for a main dashboard view?
Daniel
I use the 80/20 rule: what do I interact with 80% of the time? Lights, climate, security status, and presence. Those get prime real estate. Everything else — individual device controls, detailed energy graphs, camera feeds — lives in sub-dashboards accessible with one tap. Your main view should answer "what's my home doing right now?" in under two seconds.
"A great Home Assistant dashboard is invisible. You walk in, the lights are right, the temperature is right, and you never even think about the dashboard. That's the goal."
— Daniel Hartman
Design Principles
Q: How should someone organize entities across multiple rooms without creating chaos?
Daniel
Use the Entities card with headers to group by room, but keep it flat — no nested menus. Each room gets a collapsible section. Living room lights, living room climate, living room media. The key insight is that people think in rooms, not in device types. Nobody thinks "I want to control all my Zigbee devices." They think "turn off the bedroom."
Q: What role does mobile design play in dashboard layout?
Daniel
It's everything. 90% of dashboard interactions happen on a phone. I design mobile-first — literally sketch the phone layout before the desktop version. Home Assistant's sections view makes this easier now because cards stack naturally on small screens. But you still need to think about thumb zones. Put your most-used controls in the bottom half of the screen where thumbs can reach.
Q: What's your approach to conditional cards — showing different information based on state?
Daniel
Conditional cards are the secret weapon. My living room dashboard shows the AC control only when the AC is running. When it's off, that space shows the air quality sensor instead. You're reusing screen real estate based on context. The State Switch custom card takes this further — you can swap entire card layouts based on conditions. It's like having multiple dashboards in one.
"The hardest part of dashboard design isn't adding things — it's removing them. Every element you take away makes what remains more powerful. That takes discipline most people don't have."
— Daniel Hartman

Daniel Hartman

Home Automation Consultant & UX Designer
Former UX designer at Google, now a full-time home automation consultant. Core contributor to Home Assistant's Lovelace dashboard system. Author of The Lovelace Blueprint. Has designed dashboards for over 200 smart homes across North America.
The Lovelace Blueprint GitHub Profile hartmanhome.io
Implementation
Q: Can you walk us through your own main dashboard — what's actually on it?
Daniel
Top row: a glanceable status bar showing armed/disarmed, any open doors or windows, and outdoor temperature. Below that, a horizontal stack with the four main room light groups — living room, kitchen, bedrooms, office. Then a thermostat card, a weather forecast, and a small energy graph showing today's usage. That's it. Seven cards. Takes two seconds to scan.
Q: What custom cards or HACS integrations do you consider essential?
Daniel
Mushroom cards are the foundation — they're clean, modern, and consistent. Button Card for anything custom. Mini Graph Card for compact sensor trends. Bar Card for things like battery levels or air quality indexes. Swipe Card for grouping related controls into a swipeable carousel. That's really all you need. I see people installing 30 custom cards and wondering why their dashboard is slow.
Q: How do you handle dashboards for other household members who aren't technical?
Daniel
I build a separate "family" dashboard with big, obvious buttons. One tap to turn off all lights. One tap to set night mode. One tap to lock everything. No graphs, no sensors, no conditional logic visible. My wife doesn't want to see the Zigbee signal strength — she wants to turn off the kitchen lights from bed. Respect that.
"Every widget on your dashboard needs to earn its spot. If you haven't tapped it in two weeks, remove it. You can always add it back. A cluttered dashboard is a broken dashboard."
— Daniel Hartman
Q: What's the one piece of advice you'd give someone building their first dashboard today?
Daniel
Start with five cards. Just five. Lights, thermostat, a lock, a camera, and one sensor you care about. Use it for a week. Notice what you actually tap and what you ignore. Then iterate. Dashboard design is never done — it evolves as your life changes. The people with the best dashboards didn't build them in a day. They refined them over months.
Daniel's Resources

The Lovelace Blueprint — Daniel's complete guide to Home Assistant dashboard design, including 12 ready-to-import templates.

Home Assistant Community Forums — Daniel's dashboard showcase thread with 400+ examples from real homes.

hartmanhome.io/workshops — Monthly live dashboard review sessions where Daniel audits submitted configurations.

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