Introduction
Our client, a Fortune 10 technology company, sought to improve the usability of Tableau dashboards and rationalize workflows. They partnered with HCLTech, a longtime collaborator on internal reporting, to help develop a solution.
The Challenge
Inconsistent dashboards impacting business decisions
The client had an extensive Tableau deployment with many users, designers and developers across multiple teams and departments that introduced a lot of inconsistency and inefficiency into the dashboard production process. This was delaying decision-making and negatively impacting the eventual decision quality due to a lack of a common language for communicating data insights. In addition, the fragmented dashboard-building process introduced increasing wastefulness in the form of redundancies.
The Objective
To ensure consistency while maintaining flexibility and scalability
A key expectation from the client was to ensure that the solution could help create dashboards that translated and incorporated their general brand guidelines and standards into the Tableau ecosystem.
- The solution needed to include, in addition to principles and guidelines, prebuilt assets — layouts, banners, templates, etc. — in the right formats that Tableau builders could easily grab and implement in their dashboards
- The solution should scale indefinitely across a massive organization with sub-divisions that have different practices, needs and capabilities
- Implement necessary debugging and surface-level fixes with better-planned and built dashboards
The Solution
Greater value from Tableau through improved platform engagement
- The project ramped up with creating a style guide with templates for a specific team, thus saving a lot of time and effort. Even without the help of a dedicated designer, the project expanded to roll out the solution across the entire company.
- The team examined the company’s brand guidelines and existing design system for reference and reviewed existing reporting practices to identify key components, UX/UI patterns and, most importantly, usage data to help identify opportunities to reduce fragmentation.
- Redesigning was done, which involved basic elements like typography, colors, layout, icons and templates, and the team also created documentation for — and held presentations on — how to implement these elements to achieve consistently higher-quality reports.
- The solution included downloadable .twb templates, .tps files for custom colors and asset packages that featured the new standards already built in to further streamline the implementation of the updated assets and practices.
- The solution also helped incorporate highly specific UI elements inspired by general brand guidelines into Tableau templates, which was made possible by TabCSS, a Tableau extension built by HCLTech that empowers users to easily create customized dashboard elements.
The Impact
Better and faster decisions thanks to higher-quality dashboards
The new design system has drastically reduced the time and technical know-how it takes to create and update dashboards in Tableau, which has helped involve more users in producing visualizations. The easy-to-use prebuilt templates and other assets included in the system have provided the clarity and consistency that the client needed to drive engagement with visualizations and avoid wasting resources on fixing fundamentally inadequate builds. This has enabled analysts to focus on deriving higher-quality insights from dashboards that, in turn, have empowered decision-makers to act faster and with more confidence.
Driven by the success of the design system’s companywide rollout, the client has worked with internal users to take advantage of the solution’s scalability and continue refining and expanding it to help meet any future needs.
