Interactivity in Tableau (continued, again!)

We are focusing on Actions this week. The set of features within Actions allows the user to connect multiple visualization/dashboard and link a visualization to an external URL. The first feature i.e. connecting multiple visualizations, allows a visualization to act as a filter item for another visualization or as a data highlight item. Sounds confusing? Let’s take a detailed look at these features –

  • Use as a filter action: This action can be used when a visualization has to be used as a filter item for another visualization (this holds good for a dashboard, as well). This is particularly useful when there is data that is interlinked between various visualizations. Instead of keeping a filter card, the user can have an additional visualization, which acts as a filter, thereby making better use of space and adding more context into the analysis. While creating the filter, the user has to select the source and target visualizations which will be used by the filter action. The action trigger can be set using the following three options:
    • Hover: The trigger for this action is when the user brings the mouse over the data point in the source visualization. This kind of action is good in cases when the user is performing data exploration, rather than data analysis. This is because while doing data exploration the user will be quickly scanning across the data points rather than stopping at a single data point to perform any analysis. Also, if the number of records in the data set is large, hover action could cause performance lags.
    • Select: The trigger for this action is when the user selects the data point in the source visualization. This action is suggested when the user has to perform data analysis or the number of target visualizations that get affected are large.
    • Menu: The trigger for this action is when the user selects a data point and selects the appropriate option provided in the context menu. A menu action is best used when the user wants to provide the user with an extra layer of choice before applying the action. A good practice is to use this action for cases where the user has to be navigated away from the existing screen (it could be a different dashboard/visualization/URL).

The user also has options to choose from when he/she clears the action trigger. An example from our speed violation data set could be if we have two visualization in a dashboard. The first visualization shows the map of Chicago with the addresses marked as per violations reported. The addresses are also clustered based on geographical zones – north, south, east, and west. The second visualization shows the history of violations for each address, along with additional statistical data such as deviation from daily average, max/min for that address, etc. We may want to put a hover filter here on the map for each cluster so that the user can see a subset of the total addresses which are grouped based on their geographical proximity.

  • Use as a highlight action: This action is used when the user needs to highlight data points based on the trigger action. The non-highlighted data points still remain on the view but are grayed out, whereas in the case of the filter action the “out data” points are removed from the view temporarily. This kind of action is useful in the following scenarios:
    • The data set is large.
    • The non-highlighted data set is important for spatial reasons i.e. the proximity of highlighted/non-highlighted items is important to the user in his/her analysis.
  • Use as a URL action: This action is used when the user should be redirected to a resource outside of Tableau environment, such as a file path, URL, or send a mail. A user should be navigated away from the visualization/dashboard only when it absolutely necessary or is part of the visual discovery process. Therefore, this feature needs to be used with caution. Some sample use cases for using this feature are as follows:
    • User needs to be showed data that is not in a format that can be represented in a visual format. For e.g. links to legal documentation in the case of contract negotiation dashboards.
    • User needs to be navigated to a different but relevant data set that is not part of the data set being presented. This could be done in cases where the subset of the data, that is being linked, is needed for verification purpose.
    • The dashboard/visualization is part of an enterprise application. The data point that is being used as the action trigger is passed a parameter to the enterprise application for further business processing.
    • A user needs to be alerted/informed by mail based on a data point in the dashboard. The email feature can be setup to send an alert/information mail with the data present in the user’s trigger.

Actions provide a new dimension for the user to interact with data, in addition, to the visual representation. While setting up interactivity with actions, the points to consider are the number of source/target visualizations, whether filtering applies to each element, and the user workflow.

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