NESTED SORTING
Company: Tableau
Project: Nested sorting in Tableau desktop
Role: Senior UX Designer
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The Problem
Tableau's sorting experience was confusing and complex for our users, often requiring calculations and joining dimensions to create the custom sort desired. We wanted to change that so the sorting experience was more in line with users expectations.
The How
I was product design lead for this work and during the project I:
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Led design across numerous engineering groups, Technical leads and product owners to understand the complexities and problems with the current model
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Partnered with user research during all phases of project to understand the users confusion and needs for a better experience
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Led and designed all manner of UX through mock ups, prototypes and then worked with dev to get a working prototype in code
Sorting in Tableau is complex. I worked on this feature for nearly a year and all of us on the team (technical engineers, PM and design) had many questions about the current experience and the one we were trying to design. For seeming to be relatively 'simple' on the surface, sorting proved to be another technically complex area of Tableau.
The new sorting experience gave users what they expected by default and put different types of sorts at their fingertips.
The user just dragged the sorting pill between the other pills and the sort changes.
The Solution
Nested sorting enables users to quickly answer what is the at the top or bottom of any given element within a dataset. Nested sorting is what users often think of when they think of 'sorting' data; from highest to lowest, often showing bars that indicate this order clearly.
This project was complex, fun and challenging but also gave our users a great new tool for creating nested sorts. I also recieved 3 patents for the work I did on this project.