Think Data Thursday: The Logic of Dashboards Designing for the Whole Picture

welcome everyone to think data Thursday so today we're delighted to welcome Bridget Calgary to our webinar titled the logic of dashboards designing for the whole picture so Bridget has a wealth of experience with tableau going back as far as version 6.0 I think she's a two-time Zen master and is passionate about meaningful design and ethics and bi Bridget is a senior consultant at Technion and is based out of Columbus Ohio so it's an area famous for its ice creams I'm told so you can check out more about Bridget at tableau fish calm or you can follow her on Twitter at winds Cogley so we should have time at the end of the webinar today for some Q&A and so during the session and if you can just pop your questions into that Q&A module and at the end of the session we should have time for a Bridget to answer any questions that you have so take it away bridges well thank you very much for the introduction and I will go ahead and stop my video now but I do want to just do a quick introduction so thank you for the introduction one of the other things about me is my previous background as an American sign language interpreter so that really informs a lot of how I approach this work the other piece is I did come from more of a business side so I've done everything from HR management training prior to moving into this work as an analyst so I did a lot more in the soft space and more in the business space and ultimately my core focus these days is dashboard design so figuring out how it is we build a better dashboard and so without further ado I kind of want to go into a process that we may be familiar with which is where we start with a chart and we kind of look at okay here we've got this chart and I'll leave discussions about this chart and you know are there good things to do with dual access to see what search GDP that was a couple weeks ago but one thing I may notice my exploration is hey what's going on with profit profit seems to be a little bit low Oh actually sorry about that I do want to do a couple housekeeping things so the goals of this webinar are really to start building better - and so I'm hoping that you've come here with the hope to build dashboards that require less explaining less revisions and back and forth and less kind of those small little tweaks that we end up doing some of the other goals I'm hoping that you get out of this are that you improve you search and have better adoption so that's how I define a better dashboard one other piece I'm going to keep hitting these big ideas and so I'll go over these in bit more detail so one of them is the idea of setting the tone another is going from large to small third is the single question and I feel like we've probably heard this a few times before but I'll go over this again and the last is beyond the chart and this is one I'll really kind of hammer home towards the end so going back into our exploration this is kind of what this process has looked like for me historically where you kind of start with some charts you go okay well this is interesting tell me more about this so maybe I've taken profit and done it by category and okay well this is interesting what happens if i aggregated and compared to figure out is the mix a little bit different what's going on and so then maybe I'm looking at trend of sales and I may notice things like okay what's going on in March why is the 17th of November really hot day and then okay well everybody loves the map so I'll go ahead and put that in there and then I'm insert this X this kind of building of the dashboard and I feel like this is a process where we've been trained you know maybe we double click maybe we drag certain things out maybe we put different things in different spots maybe we put the map somewhere and we end up with a dashboard that's kind of something like this maybe we'll tweak it maybe we'll rearrange things but we'll spend a lot of time kind of trying to figure out how we want things arranged and looking at this analysis moving things around maybe we also look at this and say hey I need some KPIs my boss is going to want this and so then we kind of throw these KPIs out here and voila you know and I know my very first dashboard probably looked a bit like this scroll bars and all so this is often times kind of our beginning kind of process we start building dashboards where we've made these charts we've done this exploration maybe we spend a bit of time kind of adjusting things to make them work out but then we really start kind of moving from there of okay well I've done this maybe I'm gonna tidy it up a bit when I start learning about containers and then hey I've learned to float legends so that I'm gonna start floating the legends and maybe one of the other parts I want to start doing is making this look nicer and so this is kind of a loop where we go through we make the colors nicer maybe we color code our dual axis a bit we try to find nicer colors and sometimes we push things back on the map and I don't know about you but this is a process that I went through this was my exact path I I made very scary critters too hey I made slightly better critters but what I wanted to understand was how do I make a better dashboard I got to this point but then then what and so a big part of this journey it was a few years ago I went through this big discovery phase of how do I build a better dashboard who does dashboarding well what are dashboards really and I came up with this idea of a language and that maybe there is something to this and so I've got this big long theory but today I'm not going to discuss that what I'm going to focus on today is something a little bit more close to home something that you can kind of put to action right away so I will saying this talk is out there this journey is out there I did it for TC 16 I've got it all over my blog so if you want to learn more about the journey and how I came up with these ideas and these kind of four rules I'm going to discuss today it's out there and so I'm going to change lanes pretty drastically and put this to practice for a second and so this will have importance later it's one of these kind of diversions I'm taking you on but I promise you it has value and what I'm going to do is a quick exercise so if you will humor me and just take a minute and describe the room that I'm going to put on think about you can either do this verbally if you got a sticky note write down a couple words but I'm only going to give you about a minute or two and I want you to describe this room as if I wasn't there then give you a couple more seconds to think on it maybe jot a couple more notes down and then I'm going to jump to one question and my question to you is where did you start and when I do this presentation live I find people start as a quiet kind of a wide variety of places I historically have found 50% of people go to the table maybe thirty five percent go to the window another ten percent will start with the lights again I'm looking at starting not two or three layers down but starting and then every now and then I get somebody that starts off with the painting or somewhere else and I've done this a lot with a number of different pictures and groups and I find one thing to be fairly common and I'm hoping a couple of you will tell me I'm wrong um but what I find is very few people start off with the words conference room and I do find that this has a linguistic bias when I do this test with native signers or speakers of other languages sometimes I find that languages actually come back with different answers so there is a language bias so if you are a native English speaker I expect you to hit the table or room first if you speak other languages as your primary language just know that there is a linguistic bias to this so I did find this to be an interesting experiment and this has the use later on so I didn't just take you down this path for no good reason I promise you it has a reason because it goes back to these big ideas where we think about setting the tone and telling me that this is a conference room is a way to set the tone from there we go large to small so sometimes people start with the window they start with the table these are the two biggest things then they work their way to the light then they work their way to the painting and so we're already doing this idea of large to small and ultimately the question you're trying to answer for me is what is this room and this room is not a table this room is not chairs this room is a whole composition and so that's what I mean when I talk about moving beyond the chart so this is kind of an exercise I use as a test it really gets people thinking about moving dashboards in that way so without further ado I'm going to break this down into the four parts so the first is when we look at setting the tone and when we look at setting the tone some of this is the look the feeling the flow but it's also providing the context and so a part of this is I am going to revisit that dashboard and the first thing you're going to notice I'm going to do is instead of hitting tiled I am going to hit floating I'm also going to delete my reminder this is there for me and I'm gonna come and I'm going to do a live build and part of this is me thinking of how do I want to put these things out there and looking at when I build this composition and think about how my end-users are going to use this I am setting a tone I am trying to make a composition for others that they can understand immediately and so you'll kind of see me kind of play around with sizing a little bit but then I'm going to throw on these other pieces and parts and I do think that the difference of floating and tiled um it's I think it matters they think it affects how you analyze the data I know for me when I've got things moving around it's very hard to see and so I'm gonna start here I'm gonna kind of maybe put this guy up here on the top because I feel like that's a good spot these KPIs I did intentionally make the light because I'm gonna put them up here and I feel like this starts to give my work a bit more of a branded feel it feels a little bit maybe like the corporation I work for and so I'll kind of move these guys up here I'll fuss with them a little bit more later but part of this is looking at the analysis and beginning to understand what is it I want to convey to my end-users what is it I want them to do and so you'll kind of see I move these pieces around and I just think about what am I trying to convey and so maybe the legend goes away I'm gonna pull this piece out that's hidden and then maybe I'm gonna realize oh hey I need one more piece because something seems a mess and so you'll see I'll kind of pull this other legend out so rather than having a legend I'm going to use a chart as a legend today and so I'll pull this piece out there I'll keep doing a little bit more work on this and moving things around and kind of figuring out how do I want this to flow how do I want my users to interact with this we are going to do a little bit of kitchen magic here in that I'm going to go ahead and hop over to the final version of this to where you can see ultimately where I've ended up and so you'll notice a few things and setting the tone I've added some chart art if you will I put in lines that really weren't there I've helped organize my KPI um so this just sets the tone here I've really pushed these colors back one of the things that most people don't notice but that's very important to me because it does start to reinforce these relationships is I've got this blue for sales so wherever I've used the sales metric that item is blue and then with profit I've got this teal and so I've kept things in kind of this teal and green family when it relates to profit and then lastly I've got quantity which is just totally different and I've wet a hat and made it its own separate color just by setting the tone and playing with color very strategically I help people navigate this without them even realizing it you I've also added in some icons to help you people where to click one of the other new features I've done is I went ahead and said hey here's this lasso to select so instead of having a drop down filter to pick a period of time what people can do instead is kind of take some practices from d3 select this you'll notice the entire dashboard changes and that's done for a set action and so then that way you can actually see this last year and then in the final version of this I did take some time and put in some coding in the tool tips to help people understand what's filtered and what's not so just by providing hues pushing the color back and really focusing on the image I want to project I've really changed how this dashboard is understood so the next point I want to hit is this idea of large to small and any English majors know exactly what I'm talking about where you're building a main idea and then you're putting in supporting items and then you get into the detail I also call this approach faceting and so I'll kind of get into what I mean by that this is an example of an exploration I've done and part of this is to support the idea of where do I want to work today and so in looking at where do I want to work today I can see that my master bedroom has a lot of change and it's fairly volatile from a temperature standpoint um this is real data by the way so if you look through here and you go man your house is cold yes yes it is on the part of what I'm trying to understand is where do I want to work and so this is a great exploration for me as the analyst it's not a good exploration to answer the question I have which is where should I work and what I've done in this dashboard I've started very large to small so my high-level idea is what room is most comfortable and so by starting out I understand my master bedroom is actually quite comfortable when I get to where I should be working which is my office I find it's not nearly as comfortable just that kind of 5 degrees Fahrenheit makes a difference and what I can see is when I click on my master bedroom I'm gonna see how volatile it is per game as I scan over I can actually filter by day to really get exact feel for what that day is doing so this also helps support how I build actions versus let's say I look at my office you can see over time it's getting colder you can also see that evening not overnight seems to be the bigger problem and so I can kind of look at that I can see that there's a lot more variation in that some of that comes from when we put the sensors down there but I can also see that I've outlined my comfort zone so I did use this idea of that chart and I also made it so I could hover and kind of work with these bits and pieces so you see that this bass sitting logic really supports this drill down to the detail so moving on to trying to answer a single question and I feel like sometimes when we're designing these dashboards we get hit with this idea of we must answer everything for everybody and I really tend to push against that I really push for having a single question trying to do these kind of short answers then expanding and then kind of doing sometimes what certain people call like the five why's or kind of B what next and my goal in doing this is clarity and so I did this exercise for mobile and this is extraordinarily stripped down I showed this sometimes when people tell me oh I could never put something this minimal in production this is a great way to start and so one of the things when I'm designing is I start either in gray or in a single color to really focus laser sharp with laser-sharp position on what it is I'm trying to answer and so my question with this is simply how how is shipping doing what should I know about shipping and so part of when I look at shipping I'm looking at how many items do they send out what product count did that represent how am I you know how quickly are these things shipping out and then am i discounting potentially because of shipping and then again starting kind of that high to low and answering the single question I'm looking at where is my standard transit time falling the other part is okay well does it differ from same-day first class second class third class and then lastly getting into more than nitty-gritty details of each individual item so just figuring out do certain items get sent a certain way um one of the things I've also put on this it's not shown just yet but will be in a second as I put set action so what I wanted this to be was a more comparative dashboard and part of the reason it's designed the way it is is because it's optimized for the mobile I wanted to get this to be so that if I put this in a warehouse or if I deploy this live that somebody within a warehouse can use their phone and very quickly explore this was also a test of the new future so I went ahead and I left it on this new automatic layout to just see how could I design knowing that the would automatically convert for me so this was a test of that as well so there was some deliberate kind of design choices made just to accommodate that but what helped me to kind of look at with this analysis and again keeping it very minimal keeping it very simple was just trying to figure out where things fall and so in the final version you'll notice that I actually changed this line from being a very literal transit time to being a difference I found that what was more effective for me for this analysis was not so much the literal times but I wanted to see how much variance I had so we'll we'll see that in a few more moments but I just wanted to kind of push this idea of thinking about this more from a standpoint of answering a single question of keeping things pushed back versus really trying to put everything on there and so you get a little bit of that you can kind of add in some features and you can see how you can get this information fairly quickly you'll also notice that the form factor really limited how much I put on there and of course we've got our deep filtering as well the the final piece that I really want to push towards is this idea of moving beyond the chart and this is where we kind of explore we build but then we go back and we do this refine cycle and this is probably the point I think when I do teaching or when I work with people I feel like that that is struggle with the most and so some of this is when I start building my explorations and thinking about how do I want to convey things you know I'm piecing and parting things into a UI so I'm setting the tone there for people to understand okay this is what I want to convey and now I'm going to kind of throw things out here I've got these products so that's gonna be a smaller more detailed item and then you know maybe I want some trend lines and so I'll kind of look at this and say okay well I've got this and then maybe I'm kind of curious maybe I want to know more about this particular and so maybe I'm putting these category parts in where I want to kind of understand the relationship okay so I've got these items you'll notice I've kind of cheated a little bit and there's a reason and so I'll kind of play with these to get these labeled appropriately and move things around and really look at building an integrated piece I want people to kind of find this and feel like that it's fallen that they've kind of fallen into a world almost a big fan of certain photographs I look at photography a lot I look at movies a lot for that like do they build a world I'm interested in do they build things that I want to see and so you can kind of see now I'm starting to play with this a little bit I may even move these pieces on top of each other just to start seeing can I build something interesting that helps people understand what relates and what doesn't and so you'll see all kind of play with this and I'll finagle with this a fair back to really make this relationship clear and so that's a bit of thinking beyond the chart and looking at how do I make interesting things seem to be missing a chart but I'm going to move this guy up here and play around with this but you see where I'm starting to make interesting things and to support this analysis and so the final version of this then starts to look more like this where I really lined these pieces up and again this is one big reason why I personally tend to choose to design with floating I find it makes it easier for me to make these kinds of connections to where if I select California I can see there there's the shift where office supplies really makes up the difference in California and maybe our I want to push that more maybe I'm finding my technology isn't selling as much if I look at a place like Ohio where I'm from I can see that super store is probably going to move there brick-and-mortar out of my area unfortunately and so that's what this is helping me explore and from there I may also start looking at what products need to stay or which ones get to go but helps me kind of inform that analysis I made some UI and design and it looks like a cohesive piece the other thing is again I continuously keep pushing back those colors if I take that same idea to that mobile dashboard and and focus a little bit more on user experience and setting the tone and going beyond just the charts you'll notice I've added again more decoration I've put in little dividers I've put in just little dots to help people separate navigate and so I may play with these and move things around just to get them to look a certain way and so that way when I take it to mobile again I'm gonna kind of take those thoughts considerations around experiments I may remove ink and again think about the navigation piece so again moving beyond the chart I'm also going to think about the UI aback and look at well if I'm using this on the phone I don't know about you I've got some really fat fingers and so putting safe landing zones for mobile as well it's kind of a good consideration to I'm thinking about with this particular chart people this is where people are going to click and so I'm looking at okay well where do I want them to look where do I want them to land and so making it so that they don't have to scroll as much so these are all kind of different pieces one of the other experiments that I do with this is and this one's probably my more extreme example but really figuring out what could dashboards look like in the future I don't know about you but when I watch sci-fi movies I was wondering well why is it black why is it you know when they design on glass why is everything in the middle and I have these questions and so I seek to answer them through doing dashboards they seek to say okay well if I've got this HR data set and I want to imagine this HR data set in the future what could it look like so this is my little homage to Giorgio Moroder one of the stories about Giorgio is that he knew he needed to click so when he was making music and he wanted to design the sound of the 50s and the 60s and kind of push into the future what could that sound like he knew he needed something to help create that sound and so when I designed this dashboard I knew everything ended up in the middle and I feel like circles galore happen and all these futuristic dashboards and so I said okay well if I'm gonna do this I need circles so you've got a donut chart but then I needed a way to help people navigate so it's like okay and so I just put in various data artifacts so these little lines mean nothing other than to anchor you over to this timeline you'll notice that you know I've got turn over the labels are in weird spots um again when I look at these futuristic dashboards when I look at sci-fi movies I feel like they look at this and I really wanted to understand why I went ahead and just kind of altered some of these bar charts and then I kind of just did some survey responses so how how do people feel about their work-life balance how do people feel about job satisfaction and I've got those color-coded based on the turnover so that you can kind of see people who turnover tend to be less satisfied tend to be less happy with the work-life balance and aren't happy with the environment um I want to see does that just travel affect this so if I'm looking at people who travel really versus travel frequently um so and then non travel surprisingly was the the winner on these satisfaction so maybe people need a little bit of travel I wanted to play again with set actions and just look at you know as I start you know looking at degrees do certain people makeup am a major part of our composition and so kind of building this out and playing with this it's a very odd shape and the lines are there solely to reinforce the relationship again this is is playing with data our Tibet playing with abstraction because if you look at a lot of these futuristic dashboards there is this abstraction and then I went ahead and made a manual donut chart so this is hacking with math a lot of circle calculations and just trying to make it so that I didn't have to donut charts overlapping in the same spot I really wanted it in a weird spot you'll notice there's a ton of coloring this and so again when I looked at futuristic dashboards I looked at works like Tron I looked at the colors that they use and so this yellow is really an ugly color on white so you can actually see it on the tooltips it's a terrible terrible color when you put it on white but it looks awesome on a black background I've got a lot of noise with these white lines and that helps just kind of line things up but puts a sense of balance and just makes it look a certain way I've got a lot of translucency on the population pyramid is really really thin it's got a lot of color I've got these these bar charts behind it to help reinforce the relationship I have a lot more male employees than female employees because I had that gap there I was able to extend this chart in that space so it's not a very boxed in dashboard now people say well I could never get away with this at work and I agree I could never get away with this at work either and so I decided to make a normal ish version and again this takes into some mind some of those practices of what are my big questions so when I look at this and kind of figure out what am I trying to answer when we deal with HR data I feel like the first thing I end up having to answer is what's my attrition what's going on with my employees are they staying or are they going so I've got a 16% attrition I can kind of see the ones who quit called out with the brighter color I'm looking at traveling frequently again this is another area where I went ahead and just put in a set actions I mean it's still very modern it's still something that's probably a little too edgy to get away with in the work environment but it was something that I did as an experiment and so you can see again just by using a set actions and playing with subtlety being able to call out these particular things without it being too noisy again pushing for more abstraction looking at things like degrees and again doing kind of this composition and encouraging people to click and play this is another way to kind of draw people into our dashboards and get them thinking perhaps a little bit differently than they have historically while really making a nice gentle balance on just color and what we're trying to convey and again you can see my population pyramid is here you can see I knocked it down it takes up less space and then again that I'm no longer moving into its space the final piece that I did with this puzzle was okay well I know why futuristic dashboards are black now because when I did this would I call corporate react um which is okay you know most corporations I know they prefer lighter colors and they push you to you know use certain color guides and so I went ahead and kind of put this same type of futuristic dashboard on white and I feel like it lost some of the magic when I did this so everything's the same except for a couple of pieces so I had to push this red to orange it just felt way too harsh and overbearing on the lighter dashboard so you can see just with this corporation redact I had to make noticeable changes again I left this yellow as is I probably should change this um but there's something lost and then you'll notice to you that I knocked out the color on this it started to get too noisy with all the colors on that kind of futuristic style so I left these guys separate in part so I could kind of go ahead and do this and let you see these guys side by side to compare as well it was just it was an interesting story to me was really fascinating to see these two side-by-side together to understand what the future and to understand when I set the tone when I put things on black when I play with color and I make these very branded looking items how color matters and how the background makes a difference just the church choices and how I place things again this is one big reason that I personally tend to go with floating over tiled pretty much any day of the week um because it does give me that control so I really wanted to kind of put these out there and let you see the differences and just the design and the thought process and so with that um I go ahead and wrap up and start moving towards questions so again I want to reinforce these big ideas of the idea of setting the tone of how is it that we think about when we walk into a room how do we tell people what this room is and you know same thing with a dashboard as soon as people see it they they make a two second evaluation and I want that evaluation to be as successful as it can be when I'm designing I'm not necessarily making the pieces larger but what I'm doing is I'm trying to go from a high-level idea so whether I'm thinking about employee retention with HR data or I'm thinking about you know setting the tone with retail data and saying okay well here are my sales my profit and now I'm going to start giving you details into this analysis I focus my work with a single question and sometimes I will very literally even type that question up there especially if I'm struggling and so sometimes I take that single question to a whiteboard and I'm taking it out with sticky notes and figuring out what are they asking what is it that they want to know so that they can then take this to action I really care a lot about moving towards momentum and then the final piece is not just designing these individual charts and pieces and again this is probably why I pushed the hardest against tiles and against a lot of data Inc that separates my charts I want people to see this as an integrated piece so that way when I'm looking at things like a conference room I'm not just seeing a window or a table but I'm seeing a whole room and ideally that room is inviting it's one of the reasons why I love to go to open houses because I like to see how people draw me in I like to see what tricks they're using are they using color are they using different little tiny features so a lot of times I put in lines or I put I group certain things together to tell people these pieces are meaningful together so it's not just putting in church on a dashboard but it's also looking at this as a whole and so these are really the big ideas I would love to leave you with and when I find is that they all flow together as soon as I set the tone that really helps me move beyond the chart when I start working large to small usually I'm doing so in the pursuit of a single question so you'll see that these guys really do fold into each other and almost become one at the end um so that's me and now I will go ahead and move to questions because I'm sure you've got bunches we sure do thanks Bridget I so care here as we have about six questions in the Q&A module but I just had a quick question myself if that's okay absolutely so Bridget you have a really strong background in American Sign Language and interpretation and I was just curious how do you feel that that's helped you in creating dashboards that are really easy to understand get that message across to the receiver so interpreting is an exercise and understanding what people are saying so there is a process proposed by Betty but Betty Kalon is where you're taking the message it's a very deliberate act of listening so I'm listening I'm trying to understand what you're saying what the mood is I'm looking at the entire context in the entire picture of what's happening and I'm seeing what you're saying and then I'm articulating it as if I were you and I take that kind of same idea of if you had my skills to do this analysis what would you make what would you want to see and so I do see myself really taking my interpreter role to the same practice of okay I'm interpreting from here's the raw data I know you want to find this in the raw data you want this answered how do i bridge that gap how do I make it easier for you to understand and I own that a lot of times when you're interpreting I'm taking what people are saying I'm trying to make sure that okay if you are having a bad day I want this other person to know that I want this other person to get that same sense I want to be as invisible to this process as possible and so I'm also monitoring myself the entire time where I'm saying okay well you're having a bad day am I just projecting that because I rushed here I spilled the Starbucks latte on my lap and you know I had to do this rushed clean job in the bathroom and I you know and I'm like this so am i projecting that on you or is it legit that you also had a bad game maybe you also spilled coffee on your lap or you got here harried and this person is asking too many questions so I'm trying to take these ideas and really push myself out and understand what are my client or my stakeholders needs so that I can make this as clear as possible to them grace thanks for just as we move over to the Q&A module now so first up whenever you get a data set what is the first thing you do I want to understand the process of making dashboards from crash so a big thing that I do is I do these explorations and so it's not that exciting to watch because I make a lot of these charts where it's like okay I make scatter plots and so I'll sit here and you'll notice I'm working in gray and I'm trying to not make complex charts um so I really try to say okay well what's going on here maybe I want to see this by time of day and I'm gonna make this a line chart I'm gonna pull some of this stuff off and I just want to see what's going on inside do these really quick crash explorations to see what is happening and so I'll spend a lot of time making dozens and dozens and dozens of charts um it's a process I try not to let people see because usually when they do they stare at me but I I spend a lot of time making lines bar and scatterplots and from there then I go to this okay well now I want to start looking at how do I begin building this how do i how do these pieces work together so that's a big part of why I start with floating it's big part of where you see that sloppy I literally click three or four of these and say do these items relate to each other so you know I come here and I say okay well does this have any relation to this so I mean I may sometimes very literally put these pieces together where it's like I know these items relate and I may put them here and play around well this map is gonna end up being a big deal and so I may even get a cape more space to it and move it around there's a lot of this finagling and moving and then I'll start kind of piecing and parting and adding color um color is usually fairly late in the workflow if I can I really try to encourage people to drop out as much color as possible and I also call out with that idea I'm not alone um there are other people who say that you should start focusing not so much on color right away use color very sparingly sometimes people call that boring but what I find is it really helps you channel and focus you putting the color in where it matters so and then once I get this done then I start adding junk sometimes if you will you know I start putting in these lines I start putting in the titles a certain way or I realize okay you know I've expanded my map so large that I do have to use a text box so that it's nicely labeled I'll also go through and Shack some of this process isn't formed by years of dysfunction so I started using tableau in version 6 so some of the newer features it's like oh yeah you can do this workbook level formatting and so I realize way too late that it's available but the big thing is I do this long exploration and I put these pieces and hearts together when I work with clients the other thing I do is I really try to understand their questions and so a lot of my work ends up being maybe a set of two or three dashboards so oftentimes I'll go okay what are you trying to achieve and I'll break out those like you have a whiteboard big fan of the whiteboard but I'll break these guys out into okay well we're looking at this from a regional side you can see tableau punked me a little bit with some updates so I go through and clean up my filters but then I'll break it out by state and then I'll look at okay here's your special question um this is another way to get around that we want this to do everything and I really really buck against the idea that this should be all things to all people on the more targeted and focused you are the more successful you are the lack of clarity lack of results is kind of what I say so when you don't have that clarity you I find I struggle and I find others do as well it sounds good so speaking about the whiteboard our next question is do you ever sketch out your dashboard first so I very rarely go in with a pre-designed notion a lot of it builds and with this exploration no more I restrict myself at the beginning the more I find I struggle again I'm one of these people I do best with very loose and open frameworks I love a blank canvas when I go in to organized and to planned I have a hard time with that because then I have this locked-in notion and sometimes I'm fighting with the data um because they typically when I get in and I do my exploration I find things I find things that I think they should know about as well and so that's part of what I try to bring to these is oh hey I found this and I think you should take a look at this I have found things I have made people angry because they go well that's not what we wanted to know it's like okay well um I don't usually sketch out a use tableau to sketch thanks good next up should the dashboard be just for telling the story or does it need to be more visually appealing so I feel like those things are connected it's very much like when I walk into a house if a house doesn't have a lot of decorations or if it's not a home I know and it makes it less inviting um I kind of like so when you walk into an apartment and you're trying to figure out do I want to live here it's a big reason why I go to open home like open houses because you can see the homes where people just want to sell it and they get a lot lower selling price because they haven't dressed it up a bit because they haven't invoked that imagination and so I do find that if I invite users in because I do find that when you show somebody a dashboard they've sat to second I make my first kind of impression and decision about this dashboard and the more cosmetically appealing I make it the more likely people are to use it and not complain and I kind of go back to my initial efforts where you know I made some of these dashboards and you've got this idea a pretty this is not functional this is still garish this is not you know the colors are nice and it's everything the textbook tells you to do but it's not but it's not inviting it's not something that I want to sit and spend my time using because it's hostile and I do have a post I've not posted it yet but has got something where it's basically don't use this dashboard do you think we cue our users with making things a little bit more inviting a little bit more open of what is this okay next question would love to see the dashboards when available do you have any courses you recommend for a date of his great question on courses again I'm kind of a self learner so I tend to hit blogs if anything else on two of the big blog posts I would recommend is McCann so he's got this really awesome Adamek hands got this really awesome kind of post on dashboards and the different types of dashboards and and so you've got things like where he talks about the KPI dashboard and I find I do these rarely um view them sometimes but these are usually the things people put on a big screen what I find I live in the space of these QA dashboards I live in the space of some of these top-down and bottom-up dashboards I try to avoid these one chart dashboards because again like he mentions it requires a high level of literacy and so I don't like those just because they tend to be your more complex chart types so typically within business I'm living within these kind of first three the other part out there that I'd recommend this is this is going back aways but this is probably one of the epitome posts I mean I would print this and put this right next to your computer but it's just about some Kelley's approach to dashboard and the fact that this is a quote I know I've run around a lot with is beauty as meaningful design and so you look at the blackberry versus the iPhone and how transformative it was and that's because beauty is meaningful design because you think about the entire process you think about what you're putting out there and so I really like this post for that as well um I know tableau offers courses for me the biggest accelerant to my learning was getting out there was actually doing the work and it was hard it was extraordinarily difficult but a part of what I did was I forced myself to come up with theories and defend them and I found for me again I was probably more oriented to self learning than most people I found this to be the most helpful so I mean I went from playing with charts and doing very simple things to getting this really big defense of what makes a good dashboard and how do I do better so III think there's a point particularly with this you almost have to defend it to yourself and I think when you do that that really teaches you what your dashboards could be and why you and then the final pieces yes these resources are out there so once we're done with the presentation I'll go through and make these items available for download so that yes you can definitely pull these items down you can see this one's already here and click the button now so I know a flurry of people are going to run off but nonetheless these items are out there and I intentionally build these in tableau so that I can share them grace thanks Bridget so a question then from Brian Smith what is your favorite way to add lines to a dashboard there's a couple different ways and it depends on the type of line I'm making and I've shown this workflow to tableau a few times because I have my long long rant on what I would like for this experience to be versus what it is today and so one key common way of doing that is you simply take a text box and so we come to here we take this cute little text box and I'm not going to add any text at all and then I come to layout and I'm going to put a color on it and today it doesn't matter what color it's gonna be and then yes you're gonna see it it's gonna happen I'm gonna drag this out and then because tableau loves me they gave me where I can use keyboard shortcuts now and start moving these things around and then I'm gonna knock it down to one that works for a solid line but then the other thing I will do and you'll notice I've gone on a few different dashboards is I'm going to take and I'm going to put this text box out here and I'm going to literally hit the period key multiple times and so sometimes I do that and then because I am a little nutty I will sit there and worry about which font the period is because some periods and certain fonts are really really nice and circular and others are not again this is that either attention to detail obsession with detail on pick your poison and then I'll move that around and so again you can use your your keyboard keys to move these things around I mean you have to select it within the dashboard to move them around but then I'll kind of play with that I will also rotate these things I will go into text box objects and rotate them and move them this way so if I want that line to go that way so great question thank you for asking that so next question it sounds like you're pushing for floating tiles I wonder how the phone layout works when the dashboard was built and flows can you go back to that dashboard and maybe show us again so this goes back to some experiments and I'm actually gonna pull up the the full experiment dashboard because again I'm glad you asked that question so this is where my initial analysis and so you can see this is full floating I did for sake of alignment stuff use containers and you can see where I was kind of testing what can this thing do and so then I put it to phone and this it's not a good look for a dashboard um so you can see where sometimes when you do floating you get these various suboptimal experiences so this is where I did that stripped-down version and again all my work is floating so you can see that it converts it to tiles alright do you want to call that out is that it will automatically convert this off to a tiled layout so that's something else to keep in mind so when you go full floating the phone layout then becomes full tiled and so the final part that I did so this is the do-it-yourself mobile and this is where I went into the phone now it was on automatic and what I did that gave me this awesome clear all button and I hid it because you know I looked at the original version of this and went oh this ain't great it also extended it out far past what I wanted it to be and I said you know what start over and that's what I did then I read rag everything else out to get it how I wanted it and to make sure that I had this floating and that I had the pieces exactly how I wanted them so I wanted this text box here and I wanted these items on it so great question so sometimes mobile works out really well sometimes I do spend a lot of time on editing this the other part with mobile that I typically tend to do is I try to put some type of a color background especially for users of iPhone I find that white is a alarmingly bright and so I do try to knock down the background this match good tennis I'll do that even even with just taking a whole bit of text and dragging that down behind I can definitely go in dashboard and change it but then what I find is you end up kind of with this fight between these two items next up how do you decide which chart to pick and which color to choose so again going back to kind of say this initial analysis I usually start with a desktop layout and then I usually start with things knocked out so I do a lot of kind of finagling looking does this make sense and then sometimes I'll go back and edit a chart sometimes I'll make an entirely new chart because you know I'm seeing that I like the analysis but maybe I don't like how the charts telling the story so then I'll go in and edit the chart or change the chart or go with a whole new chart um you know or I start down a path like okay this is interesting but I'm gonna do it this way or I'm gonna add this um so for example with this you know maybe this really doesn't make sense long term and I take this out and change it to something else but I'll kind of finagle with these and look around and there's definitely a lot of back-and-forth and kind of agility within this process the other thing I do is once I think I get it to a point that I like um I step away I really try not to sit there and finagle with it too much I try to take a few moments away from it so where I'm not looking at this and I come back with fresh eyes and then reevaluate it quick comment from Joe upheld that you're the bob ross of tableau dashboards I don't know the fight for a Bob Ross thank you though so next question I like the random lines to help with the design how are you adding those lines to make them zigzag around the sheep placement on the dashboard ie Ormerod or a page more rotor is where it gets really really fascinating um those are actually charts and so I'll go ahead and pull this up and again my rotor a bit of an experiment because I wanted it to look a certain way and so mmm you also notice I label things a certain way so that way I can kind of keep track of what things are and so where do they fall and so all this is is I get a lot of rounding and indexing and playing with the data to find a way to make a line so this is definitely hacking and playing with your data if this goes so far in the realm of data art I don't even think it's funny but yes I have actually made lines and so this made a really good line and so I reused it multiple times and then with this other line so that's the blue line this was another okay I need this with this index and I took business travel for that one so it was finding the right data to make the right line definitely not best practice but um just something to think about I have also gone into PowerPoint and made shapes so me and the PowerPoint get along fine um I will go in there and make various graphics and pull them in so sometimes I want it title bars where they've gone across and then how to weird shape down I'll often go to a corporate website when I'm working with a client and steal as many assets from them as I can so how are they making this website what things can I bring in to help facilitate communication ease of learning because they already know it from their website how can I pull that in and make it useful for them and then the final piece of this again as you see we're because I'm floating I can nudge things around so I can sit here and literally make sure that this lines up exactly where I want it to and so that way it's in the right spot it's behind so there's a little bit of fudge room on that chart and then this particular chart again is really getting friendly with window calculations so just being able to make this it's just circles going around to make that full kind of circle chart and I wanted to start at a specific spot so I did kind of play with index a bit and I played with where these things fell thanks Bridget so another question from Karl Garcia can you speak more about your initial paid work using tableau and how you got your foot in the door so when I first started using tableau I was working at a company and I was managing a marketing part of was were managing a marketing department I was supporting sales through RFP work doing a bit of grant writing and then we just happened to get tableau because we were doing all of our reporting on itself this was version we were actually looking initially at version 5.3 they said no no no wait six is coming you will love six I'm part of our evaluation process was that we needed something that could do mobile and I know when people hear that you know version six and mobile that's because we're going into Adobe Muse embedding it and then doing all sorts of hats to to make it scale and to do the things we wanted it to do um again so I do come from a little bit of an older school I I joked that I started using tableau before my area how to use a group and it's true it took about a year and a half before user group showed up in my area and I was one of the more experienced people and I was still making things at that time that looked a lot like that and maybe on a good day this but I was hoping I'd find people who knew more than I did so I got plugged in with Michael Christiani and he mentored me and taught me a lot about tableau but then he also encouraged me to get involved in the community and so it was through the community and through Michael Christiani that I moved from kind of this ad-hoc role where tableau maybe made five to at most 15 percent of my job who were actually got paid to do tableau full-time on it still blows my mind it's the easiest job I've ever had I can safely design a dashboard and nobody is going to spit at me or throw things at me which happens with interpreting sometimes and I don't have to work crazy hours of the day which also happens with interpreting and also startups so it's probably the nicest easiest job I've ever had and I learned a lot through consulting including knowing what I did and didn't know because you get thrown all sorts of crazy things while you're a consultant and it's a lot of fun but I would say if you're looking to make a move get involved in the community that is the forum's that is Twitter that can be LinkedIn I don't know that I've seen as much of a community on LinkedIn also the user groups getting plugged in that way as well and then starting to if you're looking locally get to know your local area so that's what the user group comes into it play if you're looking you know all over then I would say definitely starting out with the tableau community Twitter is a fantastic resource for that and that's where I'm pardon me most active and getting to know people and having those conversations on the other big big big part is if you are looking at moving into tableau consulting I know a lot of people are going out here on tableau public and they're looking there are people who are pulling in stats there are people who are participating in things like makeover Monday and workout Wednesday and project health is and so when you get on Twitter you find all these activities it's a great way to make a name for yourself and to put yourself out there and to be seen and heard you grace thanks Bridget as Thor at the top of the error now we do have some additional questions so perhaps we can follow up afterwards and I know that the session is recorded it will be available on our YouTube channel shortly and I'd like to thank everyone for coming and we'll speak to you again at our next thing I think did a Thursday Thank You Bridget thank you

Channel: Tableau Software

Views: 20,859

Rating: 4.9081969 out of 5

Keywords: Visual data, Visual analytics, Business analysis, Business analytics, Business analysis tool, Data analytics tool, Data Analytics, Analytics, Analytics platform, Cloud application, Business analytics platform, data analysis, data visualization, business dashboards, business intelligence, tableau, tableau software

Id: _8RaUbVft-A

Length: 58min 11sec (3491 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 21 2019