screenroveDashboard design examples: what 171 SaaS home screens show first
Dashboard design examples from 68 SaaS products: 48% of 171 home screens lead with an AI prompt, 2% with a chart. Plus greetings, empty states, nav and dark.
Of 171 SaaS home screens we captured, 82 put an AI prompt box at the top of the page. Only 4 show a chart. That split is the headline of this set of dashboard design examples: the first screen after login has stopped being a report and become a place to ask for something.
Below we count what else sits on those screens across 68 products: empty states, greetings, navigation, density and dark mode. Every number comes from the Dashboards wall, where each screen is filterable and checkable.
The numbers at a glance
The wall holds 256 tagged dashboard screens from 93 products. 171 of them are home or overview screens (the page you land on), 36 are analytics pages, 31 are getting-started pages and the rest are project hubs, feeds and admin consoles. The table covers the 171 home screens. Counts are screens; a product can appear several times, for example in light and dark or before and after setup.
| Category | Home screens (products) | AI prompt | Chart | Checklist | First-run | Greeting | Dark |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Design & creative | 25 (10) | 8 (32%) | 0 | 0 | 6 | 2 | 7 |
| Whiteboards & diagrams | 23 (7) | 7 (30%) | 0 | 0 | 6 | 6 | 5 |
| AI tools | 20 (7) | 16 (80%) | 0 | 0 | 8 | 0 | 7 |
| No-code & internal tools | 18 (9) | 12 (67%) | 0 | 0 | 9 | 2 | 0 |
| Developer tools | 17 (7) | 3 (18%) | 0 | 2 | 7 | 9 | 8 |
| Video & audio | 12 (3) | 12 (100%) | 0 | 0 | 4 | 0 | 1 |
| Project & work management | 11 (5) | 2 (18%) | 0 | 2 | 2 | 9 | 0 |
| Forms & surveys | 10 (4) | 8 (80%) | 0 | 0 | 6 | 5 | 0 |
| AI app builders | 8 (2) | 8 (100%) | 0 | 0 | 5 | 5 | 3 |
| All other categories | 27 (14) | 6 (22%) | 4 | 6 | 8 | 8 | 4 |
| All home screens | 171 (68) | 82 (48%) | 4 | 10 | 61 | 46 | 35 |
Seven smaller categories, including Analytics & research and Productivity & tasks, are grouped (27 screens).
What leads: the prompt box took the top slot
48% of home screens (82 of 171) carry an AI prompt box, and at the product level it is the same split: 33 of the 68 products with a captured home show a prompt on at least one version of it. In most of them the prompt is the first element under the header, centred, with a short question as its label: "What will you build today?" (Bolt), "What do you want to know?" (Amplitude), "How would you like to start?" (Adobe Express).
The categories split cleanly. Video & audio is 12 of 12 (Descript, Kapwing, VEED), AI app builders 8 of 8, AI tools 16 of 20. Developer tools is 3 of 17 and project & work management 2 of 11. If your product produces an artifact from a description, the industry has settled on a prompt-first home. If it manages existing work, it mostly has not.
The most telling example is an analytics company. Amplitude's demo workspace opens on a prompt and two suggested questions ("What changed most in the past week?"), with the chart-based page demoted to a "Switch to classic home" link. Mixpanel's first-run screen does the same: "What should we build today?" over a prompt whose placeholder suggests "Help me track my first events".
Charts moved to the analytics tab
Charts have not disappeared, they have moved. 39 of the 256 screens show a chart, and 33 of those are analytics pages: 33 of the 36 analytics screens carry one. On home screens it is 4 of 171, from three products: Amplitude's sample-data home, Deepnote's 30-day Runs widget and Splitwise's "view chart" toggle, which draws a single mint bar of what you are owed.
Even where charts appear, many have nothing to plot yet. 11 of the 39 chart screens are first-run captures, mostly sample data or lines flat at zero.
Checklists are rarer than either. 10 home screens from 5 products (Deepnote, Maze, Sanity, Tana, Wrike) show a setup checklist, against 82 with a prompt. Most getting-started content has its own page instead: 31 screens are dedicated getting-started dashboards.
No prompt? Then it is your own work
We sorted the 35 products whose home has no prompt by the first block under the header. 19 lead with the user's own files or projects: a recents grid or table (StackBlitz, CodeSandbox, Penpot, Rive, Eraser, Mermaid Chart, Tally, Whimsical and others). 5 lead with templates or tutorials (Coda, Confluence, Krea, Mural, Plasmic), 3 with a task list for today (Any.do, Fibery, Shortcut), 3 with headline numbers (Wrike, Splitwise, Cloudinary) and 2 with a setup checklist (Maze, Sanity). Three do something else entirely, such as Duolingo's lesson path.
Headline numbers, the layout most people picture when they hear "dashboard", lead on just 3 of the 68 homes. Wrike is the cleanest example.
A third of home screens are first-run
61 of the 171 home screens (36%) are first-run or empty, and 42 of the 68 products have at least one. Partly that is our method (fresh sign-ups), but it is also the screen every new user sees. Prompt-first homes cope with emptiness best: there is nothing to be empty. 38 of the 61 first-run homes have a prompt, and an empty prompt box looks finished in a way that a grid of zero tiles does not.
Greeting by name, often as a question
46 home screens (27%) from 21 products greet the account by name. The pattern has shifted from "Welcome back" to a name folded into the prompt's question: Deepnote ("Hey, [name]. What should we build next?"), Lovable ("Ready to build, [name]?"), Prezi ("What idea comes first, [name]?") and Postman, which opens its agent card with the name followed by "how would you like to use Postman today?". 26 of the 46 share the screen with a prompt.
Greetings cluster by category. Project & work management greets on 9 of 11 home screens and developer tools on 9 of 17; AI tools and video tools greet on none of their 32. Time-aware versions are common: Sanity says "Good morning", Adobe Express "Good evening", and Any.do keeps "Good Night" fixed while the grey line beneath it changes ("Be so good no one can ignore you", "You are what you do").
Navigation, density and dark mode
Navigation. A left sidebar is still the default: 95 home screens (56%) use a plain sidebar and 48 (28%) a sidebar plus a top bar. Icon rails account for 21 (12%), mostly creative and AI tools such as Adobe Express, Leonardo.ai, Kittl, OpusClip and Taskade, plus Sanity and Smartsheet. Top nav only is down to 7 screens from UXPin, Typebot, Retool and Dribbble. Counting each product once by its usual layout gives 37 sidebar, 19 sidebar plus top bar, 8 icon rail and 4 top nav.
Density. Home screens are light on modules. 116 are balanced, 52 sparse and only 3 dense (Shortcut's three-column My Work, Confluence's For you, and Adobe Express's template rails). Analytics pages are the opposite: 15 of 36 are dense. No prompt-first home is dense, and the median prompt home has 3 modules against 4 for the rest.
Dark. 35 of the 171 home screens are dark, from 17 products. Seven appeared only in dark: Bolt, CodeSandbox, Leonardo.ai, OpusClip, Penpot, Rive and StackBlitz. The other ten we captured in both themes, so the 20% share overstates what a new user would see by default.
What to steal from these dashboard design examples
- Decide what the home is for. If users come to make something, lead with one prompt and a short question; if they come back to existing work, lead with recents. The two camps barely overlap in our data.
- Move charts to their own page. Only 4 of 171 homes chart anything. Put metrics on an analytics tab and link to them from the home.
- Write suggestions, not just a placeholder. Amplitude ties each suggested question to a named dashboard; Mixpanel puts the first useful request in the placeholder.
- Put the name where it does work. "What idea comes first, [name]?" is a greeting and a call to action in one line.
- Design the first-run home on purpose. More than a third of these homes were empty when we saw them. A struck-through checklist (Maze) or a prompt beats zero tiles.
- Keep the sidebar unless you have a reason. 84% of homes use one; icon rails make sense when the canvas needs the width.
How we counted
Screens were captured in desktop browsers with research accounts between September and October 2026, mostly on fresh sign-ups, which is why first-run screens are common. A vision model recorded each screen's attributes (dashboard type, navigation, density, chart, prompt, checklist, greeting, first-run) and every one is checkable on that screen's page. Counts are per screen after removing duplicates, plus product-level counts where stated; the "what leads" sort of no-prompt homes was done by hand from the screenshots. We record what we saw, not A/B results, so none of this says which layout converts better.
To pull these references into your own work, connect the Screenrove MCP server and ask your agent for prompt-first dashboard homes or first-run dashboards in your category.