Building interactive dashboards
1. Building interactive dashboards
Hi there, and welcome back for the final chapter of this case study. It's time to bring it all together and expose our insights to the outside world.2. Our visualizations and insights so far...
We've built lots of interesting visualizations so far, gathering insights on shipments, and inventory and exploring major challenges to our Retail Supply Chain. However, remember that any data work only matters if it brings direct business value. It's time to gather our worksheets together into cohesive, interactive dashboards and share them with our stakeholders.3. The characteristics of a good dashboard
Do you still remember what makes a good dashboard? Let's recap these concepts so that we excel in this chapter! A good dashboard is a cohesive collection of relevant visualizations answering one or multiple related questions. Remember that by grouping unrelated topics in one dashboard, you create confusion and may lose your audience. Secondly, when you build a dashboard, try to combine visualizations so that they reinforce the message. Good starting points are KPI numbers combined with well-formatted bar or line charts. Thirdly, don't forget to build in enough white space and avoid the cluttered look and cognitive overload. Lastly, strive for a consistent look and feel of visualizations and dashboards so that our users can consume them without distraction. Already bustling with ideas on how to build a shipment or inventory dashboard? Before you start building it, it's a good idea to think it through and jot your ideas first on paper!4. Dashboard interactivity
Then comes the aspect of dashboard interactivity. Thankfully we have a solid data model in our Supply Chain case, so we can easily connect various visualizations in a dashboard and interact with them by clicking on dimensions such as depicted in the video. But Tableau also allows us to introduce more complex interactivity options such as dashboard actions. As a recap to what you've already learned in the Data Visualization in Tableau course, dashboard actions allow you to control for specific outcomes, which can vary between various source sheets (so sheets on which we click or hover over) and target sheets (so where the action takes place based on the selections in the source sheet). For example, you can set up a hover-over action on a source sheet, which enforces filtering only on one target sheet and ignores the rest. We will practice basic and more advanced types of dashboard interactivity options when building our Supply Chain dashboards.5. Organizing insights with stories
Dashboards allow the end-user to discover trends in their data by looking at several aspects of the topic simultaneously. This is great for data exploration, but it can be quite tricky to remember all the interesting insights one finds when clicking through the dashboard. Such insights can then be "saved" into Stories, where the findings can additionally be equipped with a narrative.6. Our two dashboards
It's time to think about the dashboards we will build in this case study! Throughout this case study, we've generated a lot of charts while exploring the data, but it doesn't mean we need to cram them all into a dashboard. We will distill the most useful ones and assemble two dashboards for our fictitious company, "Just In Time". In a shipment dashboard, we will group the most important worksheets related to shipment delays. We will then prepare an inventory dashboard, which will focus on organizing our insights on the supply and demand and inventory trends per Product Category. Finally, we will enable interactivity on our dashboards!7. Let's practice!
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