Building user-friendly, interactive visualizations

1. Building user-friendly, interactive visualizations

Glad to see you back! In this video, we will learn how to make our visualizations more user-friendly and interactive.

2. When less is ... more

I didn't have the time, so I wrote you a long letter; a quote attributed to Mark Twain reminds us that it takes some work to simplify and synthesize as opposed to swarming the reader with too much-unstructured information. We, analysts, love data, and our primary instinct is to show more, to enable our visualizations' users to discover all our data has to offer. Busy building dashboards and adding more graphs and tables, we often forget to think about the impact we make on our stakeholders - the consumers of our work.

3. Flexibility vs. usability

In our good intentions to expose all the data, we tend to gravitate toward the "One dashboard to rule them all" mentality. Overwhelming our stakeholders, we are causing a cognitive overload resulting from an influx of new and complex data in large quantities. This may lead to distractions, loss of interest, and an inability to distill key insights from our brilliant dashboard. There is a sweet spot between the Flexible and the Usable so let's learn which tools and techniques are on our side.

4. Design - formatting - interactivity

Firstly, think about the proper design, logically leading from general to detailed information and keeping the style simple and consistent throughout your visualizations. Don't forget to include enough white space for more focus. Use all available formatting options at your disposal to accentuate the essence. Use chart elements to your advantage and avoid overloading visuals with too many stimuli, such as color, shapes, and sizes. Lastly, consider introducing some interactivity to your visualizations. User-friendly and easy-to use-parameters, dynamic displays, labels, and drill-downs allow you to hide more information and only show it when needed. If it adds value, consider adding animations.

5. Keeping it user-friendly

Tableau has been designed to build business-friendly dashboards, so let's look at several tools it has in store. As we have seen in the previous demo, you can use the chart and sheet titles to highlight important information based on measures, dimensions, and filters. You can also refer to things like the last data update. Using color and font formatting helps emphasize your points. Viz in a tooltip is a pop-up chart that appears when hovering over a visualization, revealing extra information relevant to a given data point. It's a neat way to "hide" more information and only display it when needed.

6. Making it interactive

Actions are a great option to introduce more interactivity to our visualizations. They allow changing values by clicking, hovering over, or selecting data points in the chart, making it intuitive and interactive for our users. We can explore the data efficiently and discover more insights in a few mouse moves or clicks. They require a little bit of getting used to, so we will look at them in detail in the demo and exercises.

7. Tips for stimulating user-adoption

Finally, let's see some practical tips on enhancing the user adoption of your dashboards. By designing and developing your visualizations directly with stakeholders, preferably in short feedback loops, you gain their buy-in from the start as they become your partners and are invested in the final success. Once your dashboard is final, train your users via interactive sessions properly. Avoid one-way communication with a static slide deck. When you document your work, do it visually, for example, by providing a short demo recording or animated explanation on how to use specific functions. Lastly, make sure to monitor the usage of your tools and take necessary actions if you see the adoption dropping.

8. Let's practice!

Enough theory for now - let's see it all practice.

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