All tagged Tableau Design

Do you ever find yourself working on a data-related project and wonder "What are we doing here?". While data-related endeavors can drive massive values, many of them are fairly directionless. Maybe there's a top-down mandate to "become more data-driven" without much thought about what that actually means.

We believe that the highest purpose of data analysis is to support informed experimentation. Creating dashboards with facts and figures is helpful, but it's really only the first step in the process.

Ready to learn about those additional steps and how you can drive value in your organization? Check out this video on the purpose of data analysis!

One of the most important steps to developing a successful Tableau project is the ideation and whiteboarding phase. In the modern world, we often don't get to do that whiteboarding in person. That poses a real change. Whiteboarding in person is instantaneous. It's easy to erase one idea and sketch another. That becomes a lot more challenging in a remote, online environment.

Even the best online sketching tools are a bit clunky, not to mention it's hard to sketch well on a computer screen with a freehand or stylus.

Have you ever needed to use your own colors in Tableau? Maybe you need to use your company’s colors, or a brand’s colors, but you’re not sure how to save those colors into Tableau for repeated use.

You absolutely can add your own custom color palettes to Tableau. You’ll need to add some crucial code to the preferences file to do it!

Navigating around the dashboards you’ve built can be difficult. How do you build a good homepage? How can you easily toggle from one dashboard to the next without it feeling clunky? Is it even possible for Tableau dashboards to feel easy to navigate?

In today’s video, we answer all those questions. We’ll build a great homepage that allows you navigate to all your dashboards, using icons and buttons. We’ll create dropdown, hamburger menus and a home button to help your users navigate to other dashboards, or go straight back to the homepage.

These skills can make your dashboards feel slick, professional, and user-friendly!

How do you approach a new data set in Tableau? Do you spend a while studying the fields and data types? Or do you Google what other people have built using similar data? Maybe you like jumping straight into building to see how things shake out?

I lean toward the latter. Building visuals allows you to learn the data quickly, develop insights, and expose data issues (let's be honest, there are almost always wrinkles to work out of the data).

Effective data dashboard design is an art. It requires meticulous attention to detail. It includes visualizing the right data, displaying the appropriate level of granularity, designing an efficient layout, and making a number of minute design decisions so the data hits your user "just right".

If you're looking for a checklist of design elements to review before your next dashboard rollout, you've came to the right place! In this video, we discuss the following 15 design best practices:

A few weeks ago, we took a look at how to build donut charts in Tableau. Building a donut chart is similar to building many other views in Tableau. It’s simple to set up, but how do you get it looking really great?

This question comes up in my classes. Often, it’s the way we format our charts that has the biggest impact on our end users. So, while this week’s video pertains to donut charts, I hope that it holds some tips and tricks for adding layers of interest into our other views and charts too!

How often do you build a Tableau dashboard and feel like it has too many filters? This happens to me all the time! You don't know what to do with them, right? Make two rows of filters? Ugh. Make a massive column? That's a lot of screen real estate. Add show/hide buttons so users can toggle a layout container on and off the page? That doesn't seem ideal either. What if someone doesn't realize they can show filters?

Does your dashboard feel cluttered because you're trying to communicate too much supporting information to your user? Making sure you cover everything your user needs to know can leave your output feeling more like an essay than a data-driven dashboard.

Info buttons are a staple of Tableau dashboards. They allow you to pack so much additional information to a dashboard without cluttering the view for users.