5 Things I Do Before Publishing A Project
When working on a project we all feel eager to reach the finish line; we analyze and develop with the intention of putting it out there or delivering it to a client. But that adrenaline rush can lead us to miss the finer details that really polish and refine your work. Below are five things I check before putting out a Tableau dashboard as they are all things that can very easily slip through the cracks while focusing on the bigger pieces. I’d rather be safe than sorry!
Device Layouts
The impact of this may vary depending on whether or not you’re #teamtiled or #teamfloating but regardless of your design style it’s important to know how your dashboard will render on different devices. Not only is it good to understand how it will look on a phone or a tablet, automatic sizing or floating containers could shift even on different laptop/desktop screen sizes. If the view you made translates poorly to other devices with the Tableau automated layouts, I would recommend deleting that layout. However, if it is important to your deliverable for more widely accessible viewability, you may want to consider a device specific layout (to come in a later blog).
Tooltips
If you’re anything like me you’ve probably formatted the tooltips multiple times but adding and removing things from the view can alter this as you continue to format your viz. Tooltips can provide a lot of context and are an important part of how your audience interacts with your viz so it’s essential that they aren’t missing information that you meant to include. Additionally, it’s usually a good idea to turn off the command buttons.
Max Text
Look at your dashboard, I bet it’s beautiful. That is until the viewer filters or scrolls down to that one specific value that changes everything. Specifically, I’m referring to the longest value in your dataset that may not be entirely visible with the current container, row, or column size that you’ve selected. I have a little trick for this where you need it. It utilizes the string calculation LEN to return the value with the maximum number of characters. I filter to this to double check and I’ve been thankful more than once that I did.
Buttons
Adding buttons that take you to a website or another dashboard in the workbook are a great way to expand the interactivity of your work. However, it’s easy to include a URL with a typo or navigate a button to a different place than you intended. I click everything on my dashboard before delivering (filters and parameter and set actions as well) but I find that buttons are the ones that I’m most likely to make a small mistake on. Just click it. And then again. And one more time to be sure.
Disable Highlighting
While adding intentional highlighting to your viz can help the user to identify correlating marks on the view, it can often be unnecessary and distracting when left on too many places in the dashboard. It’s really easy to forget about but luckily even easier to change. Simply create a calculated field with a static value like “1” and add this to Detail on the Marks card in your sheet. On your dashboard there should be a little highlighter symbol at the top, select your new dimension. Now selecting a mark won’t result in singling the value out.
There are so many little pieces that really bring a dashboard together but these are a few that I consistently keep top of mind to assure that a smooth experience for the users (and so no one has to DM me on Twitter saying I forgot something, it’s multipurpose).
