The Problem
In Tableau, a custom view is the easiest way to tailor the look and feel of a dashboard for individual viewers. It allows you to set multiple filters and parameters and then keep it as the default view. If a user subscribes to the custom view the filtered state will be seen in their email inbox.
The problem is, custom views break. They are so brittle that any change to the data source or dashboard will break all of the custom views assigned. This is what caused custom views complaints to rise to the top of our cue of customer concerns.
Getting to the bottom of things
I worked with PM Katrina Midgley to investigate these customer concerns and come up with a plan to solve this problem. My first step was to create a flow chart of the custom views and subscription handoff process and pin it up on the wall so that we could pinpoint areas in the flow where the custom view problem was cropping up. Katrina and I listed our assumptions about this problem and began making hypotheses.
User Interviews & Scenarios
We then drafted interview scripts for the different roles our customers played in the process including dashboard authors, data analysts, custom views creators, and everyday viewers. With our scripts in hand, we took dozens of customer calls and hosted a customer lab at Tableau Conference where we interviewed dozens more.
Synthesizing feedback
The feedback was amazingly complex and broad. People were going to such great lengths that they would hire offshore development teams to recreate thousands of custom views in the night after a data source migration. We went back to our original flow and started compiling our notes.
Finding solutions
We boiled the problem space down into two big buckets:
The custom views are too brittle
The custom views can not be managed when they break
We pitched solutions for each of these problem areas and it was clear that with our resource allocation we were not going to affect the brittle nature of the custom view. The technical constraints of giving every filter and parameter a unique ID would deeply impact dashboard performance and involve rebuilding the feature from the ground up. I created a document that outlined several usability issues uncovered in our interviews and socialized it with our team.
Choosing our battles
Katrina and I pitched a way forward that would help users manage the situation when custom views break. We created a new custom view content type on Tableau Server. I worked with the lead designers on Tableau Server to align this content type with its unique characteristics. We also did a complete overhaul of the error messaging system so that people who received broken custom views could better understand how to take action and get things back on track.
Conclusion
Our solution was completed before the next Tableau Conference and broadcast on the main stage during the 2020 Devs at Desks Event.
As of writing this post, the custom views page continues to gain activity week over week on Tableau Server much more than the connected Metrics pane that I also designed. This is largely due to the error message work calling users to take action on broken custom views.
