“Keep it Lean” – Tableau on your mobile
Time is something we are all short of and as we try to catch up with ourselves, technology is doing it’s best to keep up with us. Increasingly, we carry work in our pocket and for the ever-evolving Tableau user and DataViz designer, creating visualiations with mobile in mind is an imperative.
We were mulling this over last week in our Dublin offices when we came across a blog post authored by dataviz lover and confessed chocoholic Sophie Sparkes
In her post My top 5 mobile design tips, she offers great advice for those who are designing for mobile.
“Design for mobile first,” she says. “It’s much easier to avoid object overload (a cluttered dashboard) if you first design the phone view of your viz. You can then add extra context to larger tablet and desktop views.”
Having taken that into account, Sophie advises making sure that you design “the way people hold their phones”, in other words, vertically.
Another key point and one that many working in the trade might find difficult to accept is the omission of tooltips.
“Don’t expect people to click for tooltips on mobile,” writes Sophie. “Phone screens are small and people are unlikely to click on data points to see important information in the tooltips. If the information is important, use annotations or the title to call it out.”
She backs this up with a quote from Archie Tse, Deputy Graphics Designer at The New York Times: “If content is important to people, don’t hide it.”
It’s also worth bearing in mind that mobile devices are different sizes and in order to make sure as many as possible are catered for, she suggests “building for the smallest screen within the mobile range you think most people will use (I go with iPhone 5), and then minus a few pixels for padding and design for that size.”
Finally, Sophie suggests keeping the Viz lean simply because “no one wants a viz that takes ages to load”.
Back in Dublin our own Kevin Lynch was lapping it up.
“Sophie is so right here,” he says. “You have to be conscious of the impact of reduced dashboard space on the flow of quick filters and actions; simple and clean is best for mobile”
“I think it’s also worth considering why the user is on mobile,” he continues. “Are they normally a desktop user or will the report only be seen on mobile? Is it a summary of a report normally consumed on desktop or a fully mobile report? This will inform your design choices”
For Kevin, testing the final results on a few friends’ or colleagues’ devices is also worthwhile and can save a lot of pain in the long run.
“The device preview is very useful,” he says. “But honestly it doesn’t replace actual test to sense check.”
So the message seems to be: keep it lean and mean to keep them mobile keen.
