TABLEAU CLOUD
ADMIN SETTINGS
Company: Tableau
Project: Redesign Admin settings in Tableau Cloud
Role: Lead UX Designer
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The Problem
Tableau Cloud admin settings had become a confusing, and cumbersome area of the site. It needed a new IA, a new UX and visual design update. As the lead UX designer, my job was to design a new and efficient solution.
The admin settings in Tableau had become outdated and neglected. It became the area that no team owned but everyone contributed to. Users often became frustrated looking for a setting and found it confusing and time consuming. Not only that, but adding new settings was difficult because there was no categorization so most teams ended up adding to the the bottom of (what became) a very long scrolling list.
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The How
The first step was to form a team of design, PM, CX and User Research to meet and together create the principles and design goals that would guide this project forward. This was done through a series of meetings and brainstorms. I revised and reviewed each revision with the team and got their feedback.
To make sure that the site’s information architecture was aligned with user expectations, we had a card sorting session using Figjam. Our goal was to find smaller, intuitive groupings for the existing 55+ settings. After organizing the data, we ended up with 8 clearly defined main categories with 4-8 subcategories in each.
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We also had a design brainstorm for which the goals were: to do a competitive analysis of other sites settings, review these as a group, and each participant would post their best idea for a new design and share that idea with the group. This allowed me to listen to others ideas and gather as many different ideas as I could before beginning to ideate on concepts.
After some design brainstorms involving competitive analysis and group activities to help with categorization. I took all the data, design ideas and began creating concepts for the new design. I did these at a very low level of fidelity to show the concepts and get feedback from the team. After having multiple iterative reviews with the team I moved forward creating higher fidelity mock ups.
Search for settings was clearly needed. Users mentioned this many times in the study and we knew with almost 60 settings that it would be the key to making this feature simple, easy to use and the fastest way for a user to find what they needed. We decided the search would be specific to settings so it would act more like a filter and not search the whole site.
The search results would highlight the settings containing the search word or phrase and let the user take action immediately. The use of the toggle switches meant that changes to settings were now dynamic which was a huge win for the project. This was a great success story and I'm proud to have led such a great feature.
The Solution
The new design for settings consisted of a new IA for the settings groups/sections, a new UX paradigm which allowed users to more quickly interact with settings, and a visual update to keep aligned with Tableau brand guidelines. I also added a search for settings so users could use the search specific to settings to find what they needed quickly and efficiently.
