Overview
Here’s something you are welcome to try – have a friend or colleague go to a Tableau Public URL that contains multiple tabs; then see how many people realize that there is in fact more than one view / dashboard available for him/her to explore.
I’ve created hundreds of dashboards with multiple tabs and the bottom line is most people will not notice the tabs. This is why my dashboards have navigation links; i.e., arrows that people can click to move forward and back).
The problem is that crafting these forward / back buttons is very time-consuming; each one has to be “hand-chiseled” as it were. Indeed, I spend as much time on the cosmetics / usability component of dashboard development as I do building the actual visualizations.
Compounding my frustration with this is that I really have little or no use for the tabs along the top, but the navigation buttons won’t work unless the tabs are visible.
See for yourself. Go to http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/DataRevelations_CTO_CompEquity_2012/CTOCompensationandEquityBenchmarks2011 (this is a work in progress) and check out the navigation buttons. I think they are reasonably intuitive and discoverable, but they won’t work unless the tabs (which are not readily discoverable) are visible.
So, I respectfully submit a feature request to the folks at my favorite software company – please make it easy for me to generate a clickable table of contents, and please make it easier to build forward / back buttons.
But….
… this request is a distant second to my top Tableau feature request (let’s all chime in together): Dashboard-level filters.
