What are your preferred ways for making a lot of details available to your users?

[irismaessen]

We have a lot of very detailed information available for our users, and there's often a need to drill into these details from the dashboard.

There's variety of techniques available for this; we usually use the Jump To Dashboard feature to link to more detailed dashboards or have set up drill hierarchies within a pivot but these each have their own limits as well.

What have you found to be good ways to allow users to go into lots of very specific detail while still giving useful overviews?

[szimmermann]

I like JTD well enough. It's a great solution for dimensional slicing. I am also a fan of the Tabber widget for this reason but on a smaller scale, although I do have to keep in mind the number of widgets I cram in to each Tab as it can impact speed. I'm currently using Tabber to do comparisons between different KPIs, but have used JTD in the past as a quicker scripting workaround for unit conversions ... # v % is one example, since the calcs are drastically different in my case; it would have been too much to cram them all in one dashboard and subsequently hide what's irrelevant like with Tabber. And I will say Tabber exports to PDF can be wonky, so if that's the intended mode of consumption, be sure to tweak the preview and save it! 🙂 

[irismaessen]

JTD has been a lifesaver in the respect of presenting details, indeed, because it often allows me to just present a table with the data organised in a way that a drilldown in a pivot just will not allow.

This will also make it easier to download that data, but with large tables the opportunity to explore data in the dashboard is quite limited. It feels like doing this is giving up and just presenting the data for my users to analyse in, for example, Excel.

Filtering is another option. Another way I've tried to cram details in our dashboards is by making extensive use of 'affects dashboard filters' functionality in bar/pie chart widgets to present the top x most interesting values to potentially filter on and surface details that way, but I'm left wondering if my users notice and *use* those filters, or all that detail is left languishing.

[hlorosc]

have you thought about explicitly noting the ability to filter using the 'affects dashboard filters'. One thing I'm doing more of these days is providing text boxes with guidance on how to use the dashboard, key things they should know. Recording a quick video could help too. I know that's not really about the widgets or visualizations themselves, but I'm increasingly focused on the guidance/training in the vehicle if I can.

[szimmermann]

Love this idea!!

[irismaessen]

If I think it is particularly important that people right-click to select, I note it in the title of the widget. Otherwise I include it in the widget description that shows up if you hover over the (i). And we have documentation for the dashboard linked on the dashboard.

So I've done some of that too, at least.  I guess the part of 'but I don't know whether people notice' is also down to it being difficult to measure how much these things actually *get* used. Usage Analytics is a wonderful tool, but it doesn't say too much about filter useage.