Tableau Catalog
Data Management
I’ve led UX work in the critical areas of Tableau Catalog including data discovery, trust, impact analysis and governance.
Tableau Catalog is an analytics catalog that bridges the gap between enterprise catalog and Tableau platform by offering contextual metadata for data analytics and consumption. That unique product position requires the product experience to meet the need of all types of users, such as admin, data engineer/owner/steward, analyst and business user.
Working for Tableau Catalog, my daily challenges are discovering user challenges and needs in their data jobs. I create and iterate on solutions to balance among user needs, business priority and engineering retrains.
Lineage
Lineage is one of the core functions of Tableau Catalog. It enables impact analysis among Tableau content and external databases and tables that are indexed into the Tableau environment.
After taking over the MVP-scope UX, I improved lineage filtering experience by adding more visual clarity and hierarchy, and validated it with several internal testings.
To expand lineage functions and support more use cases in impact analysis, I’ve created ux concepts of multi-filtering, showing downstream calculations and external ETLs based on the existent UI framework of lineage.
Multi-filtering on lineage
Downstream calculations on lineage
External ETLs on lineage
Trust Indicators
Building trust on data and analytics in Tableau environment is a critical mission for Tableau Catalog. Data certifications and data quality warnings add more visibility for creators and viewers to understand and trust the data that they’re interacting with.
After taking over the MVP-scope UX, I unified the viewing experience of certifications and data quality warnings. I leveraged the design results and proposed new components to Tableau Design System to expand the ways that content were labeled and classified in Tableau environment.
There’s much more information that can help consumers evaluate and trust data. I’ve been leading the UX vision of data labels initiative. So more critical metadata, such as data sensitivity and compliance, will be visible in Tableau environment.
Search for Data
Search and filters in Tableau Server and Cloud had been very under-developed and received low adoption from users.
I collaborated with Search UX and engineering teams to launch an improved and unified search experience in both Tableau Server/Could and Catalog areas.
In the new search experience, useful metadata is prioritized in filters, sorting and search results to increase the speed of finding data and trust on search results. It also has broken away from the legacy framework of displaying content by categories. So users are no longer forced to choose a content type before seeing the results. Instead, mixed types of results are returned and ranked by relevancy based on the search query.
