It’s A Long Story
Hello again all you Tabby-leau-vers!
It’s been a while, but we come back with an interesting perspective.
Those of you who are familiar with us know that the inception of our journey with Tableau wasn’t very long ago — 2017 only to be precise.
When we started out, the objective was to leverage the power of Tableau and unleash it on effective reporting! Sounds cool right?
We had dreams and goals of interactive dashboards, cool visuals, filters (context filters even!), no more tables, no more excels, and get this — self-serve reporting! Yes, these were all 2017 goals.
Little did we know, that the journey we had in mind would lead us onto a whole new path — a path that made us question the entire reporting process.
Our initial versions of dashboards were very exploratory — charts, parameter changes, filters — all elements that let you slice and dice your data and dig deeper for those hidden insights and trends. Along that road, we recognized the need for a good naming convention implementation.
Very quickly we realized that although this was a very useful format, and Tableau made it super easy to build these tools, it really wasn’t a format most users were ready to adopt.
It makes sense when you think of it this way, when “analyzing data” isn’t your passion, reporting is that stepchild in your work life, which you have take care of, but you don’t really want to. So then, you do the bare minimum, you pull the manual reports, you turn to your familiar friend excel, and you wrap it up with a pretty powerpoint. It’s the known thing to do, it’s comfortable, and it gets the job done. (Afterall the client is just going to pivot the data right?)
If we collected a dollar for every time after a dashboard walkthrough some one said, “This is awesome! But do you think I can export this in a table?”, we’d be rich people!
After this harsh discovery, we decided to rethink our entire reporting process.
We wanted to deliver data in a way that it would not only be useful, but also easy to consume, and more importantly take action on.
The exploratory views, as useful as they were, were more of a second step rather than the first. What they needed were a set of guided insights leading up to them.
Enter storyboards!
We took an approach to use Tableau stories to answer key questions in an easily consumable way. Each slide is an answer to a question explained in plain English, with a maximum of 2–3 charts, with minimum interaction.
For example — do you want to see how your channel is performing YoY?
Here’s a simple story of revenue trending over time with year on color, and here is the spend for the same period.
We are now in the process of gathering these key questions to answer, key elements to monitor — all which will be part of guided insights to spot trends/interest points which prompt you to take the plunge into the exploratory report.
All this is well and good but what about the exportable tables you ask?
We seem to have found a middle ground with that for now — a very imporatnt aspect of our job is to educate the user of the power of data and tools like Tableau which allow us to use this data in a quick, efficient, and actionable way. It is our responsibility to find a way to do that using a combination of exportable tables and charts along with guided insights.
And our moment to shine is when we can leverage the power of Tableau to pull data for ad hoc reports within minutes — most usual reaction — mind blown! (Small wins guys, small wins)
Long story short — our goals have now changed to enhance our current set of reporting to provide easy insights for the real questions that matter, that need to be answered, or monitored — because although most people think of reporting in a reactionary way i.e. at the end of it all, it really only is the answer to the question you started out with at the very beginning!
We’ll be writing more about our dashboard development process in the coming posts and how we are using Tableau to help us through it so stay tuned!
And of course — here’s some Tabbyleau ❤
