I have build a lot of admin dashboards in my career, and I've always wondered if any of the designers of these templates actually build or even used a dashboard

I have build a lot of admin dashboards in my career, and I've always wondered if any of the designers of these templates actually build or even used a dashboard before. What you need in 99% of the cases are just grids and forms, which need to be controllable without a mouse. Admin dashboards are used to manage data (basically just a GUI around the DB), and to perform day-to-day tasks (basically buttons to trigger certain actions). In practice, the eye-candy graphs are almost never looked at by the user. If you really need fancy graphs, you're probably much better of using something like grafana. Ask any experienced worker who actually use these dashboards for 8 hours a day, and they will always tell you the prefer their old AS/400 or DOS terminals over webforms, just because it's so much more usable. - Don't spend your time on building graphs, give your users the ability to export CSV or give them SQL access. They will learn. - Don't use paging, you need search. Paging is an anti-pattern that just indicates users can't find the relevant data. - Forms with loads of whitespace and animated labels don't add anything useful for the user. Focus on accessibility and feedback instead.