Tableau Prep
Data Management
At Tableau Prep, I led ux design on a large variety of released features. With consumer facing product background, I specialized in making data prepping flow more interactive and visual. My focus area aligns with the market position of Tableau Prep, because it offers easy and direct ways for data preparation with immediate results.
On top of interaction design for data preparation, I also worked on technical domains such as embedding credentials, incremental data refresh and pivot data recommendations.
My role
Senior UX designer
2.5 years (2018-2021)
Duration
Group Steps
Data preparation often involves creating complex flows that cover multiple business rules or cleaning objectives. These complex flows, containing many reshaping and cleaning operations, are often challenging to edit, share, and maintain.
With grouping feature, author can collapse multiple steps into a single group that behaves like a single step, making it easy to copy and reuse in multiple flows, move around in a large flow, or to help with overall flow comprehension.
Insert and Move Steps
During data prepping, authors sometimes need to revisit previous workflow and make modifications.
Being able to insert additional steps into a flow and adjust positions of steps were popular asks from customers. To make the experience easy and intuitive for them, I used clear visual cue and feedback to help them identify where and how to action and foresee the result.
Flow Navigator
Navigating a large flow can be difficult, because it requires scrolling back and forth to see all the steps.
During this project, I researched among navigation functions of visual mapping tools and came up with a few design proposals.
The final design in the released version offers miniature version of the entire flow and a navigation tool. You can also zoom in or out of your flow and re-center the flow to fit the screen and bring the full flow into view. You can collapse the map when not in use so it takes minimum presence from the flow area.
Flow Lineage
Troubleshooting a flow is an important part of data cleaning process. Flow lineage tells the origin of the field with highlighting feedback on the flow lines and steps.
When author selects a field in any step, they can see the steps where that field comes from before and goes into after, and the relevant annotations associated with changes made to that field.
Mapping Connections
When making changes to connections, customers needed a simple way for them to tell which table or data source linked to which input step.
To make the mapping experience direct and self-explanatory, I added highlighting effect on the connection in response to user’s selection on the input step. With the support from visual team, we finalized colors and forms for highlighting states on connection pane.
Flow Line Revamp
The revamp project was initiated and completed by me and two devs in a hackathon week.
I addressed usability issues of displaying diagonal lines between steps that were shipped as MVP scope for Tableau Prep. The new design improved legibility of flow lines by reducing overlapping and adding directionality. It also added visual delightfulness to the flow with its curved and smooth style. I also came up with routing rules for flow lines to minimize crossing over each other and steps.
This hackathon project has been planned as a new feature for Tableau Prep in later 2022.
Flow lines before revamp
Flow lines after revamp