What is up, measure friends?
This is Eric from MeasureSchool.
Are you proud of the dashboards you've built?
I sure am.
But when I checked back with my client
three weeks later, it turns out that they're not using it anymore.
After some feedback,
found out that it is too crowded and that they didn't know where to look.
I went through the checklist we are going
to go through in this video to declutter our dashboards down to the essential.
For our example,
we will use one of my favorite dashboards from the template gallery.
Now, what if I was to tell you that we could reduce all the information that you
see here into a dashboard that is less than half its size.
Like this.
Let's see how to achieve this in Looker Studio.
We are now in the Report Editor,
and I can tell you right off the bat that there are at least five components
that could be removed or modified for analysis and design purposes.
First, the blue header bar.
Now, header bars are very common to most
dashboards, and they tend to be a bit larger with a logo added in somewhere.
To be fair, this header bar is quite small and poses not much of a problem.
However, if I was to ask you right now
to close your eyes and tell me what insights you remember,
probably this header bar will be lingering in the back of your head.
Now, part of removing distractions is
to remove shapes or backgrounds that have high contrast.
Let's delete this.
Then now just move this up a little so we
can have our fade color spread out and let's move up our scorecards.
Let's move on to the second issue, maps.
We all love maps and I myself am guilty
of adding maps wherever I can because they're just so beautiful to look at.
But are they relevant?
This has to do with your target audience.
For example, if metrics such as sessions and page views are key to your business,
then clearly the majority of them can be attributed to the United States.
Unless you're exploring new target markets or currently have other target markets,
the United States here will be your target market.
Therefore, why build your reports around all this list of countries?
This is painful, but let's remove this map.
I'll move up our table right now.
Okay, for this table, we are now left with two choices.
If you currently have other target markets, then we could simply reduce our
table to show maybe our top five countries.
However, again, if the US is the only country where you provide goods
and services, then we can completely delete this table.
We could add a filter instead.
To add a filter that will apply to your
whole report and not just one specific chart, head over to Page,
Current Page Settings, and here, add a filter.
To make sure that we only have US data, we can create a country filter.
I'll keep include. Let's select the field which will be
country equals to our target market which is the United States.
Click Save and you can see your numbers change.
Now I'd like to keep the channels that are
driving engagement so I'll just select them and replace them right here.
Now we have our demographics data with age group starting from 18 years old to 65
and plus, and which are divided by gender, with male and female.
For age, we could use a data control instead of this chart.
Add a control, drop down list, just place it here.
Let's replace our dimension with age.
Now your users can select their age groups of interest.
Now, here we can see, however,
that our audience is primarily composed of users from 18 to 34 years old.
Let's say we were interested in the second group, so those between the ages of 25
to 34 with the gender of female instead of male.
We could also use filters for that and therefore we could delete everything.
Let's delete this chart.
I'll also delete those.
Let's go back to our initial filter
and you could go to resource and Manage filters.
Let's edit our previous filter.
We'll just add in this information.
So go to end, keep include.
We'll select age equals two as a condition, age 25 to 34.
Let's add another condition.
This time we'll select the gender.
Same condition and let's put the gender.
Let's click on Save and watch the numbers change.
I'll also delete this data control.
I'll delete also these components.
Let's select everything by just clicking and dragging.
I'll just move this up a little.
Now, we only have one issue left is
that we still have all this blank space that needs to be removed.
For this, we'll just reduce the height of our canvas.
Go to Page, Current Page Settings, style.
Here in height, we'll reduce this from 1,200 to let's say 500 pixels.
Type Enter.
Now, let's View our report, and here you go.
Another way to avoid overcrowding your charts is by adding optional metrics.
Optional metrics allows you to add dimensions and metrics in a chart.
Then users can come and select which one can be displayed.
For our example,
I will remove the channels that are driving engagement and replace them
with a table, which is the one that we used previously, right here.
Now, typically,
you would add your dimensions and metrics this way by selecting the chart and then
going to dimension and adding your dimension here.
We can add our default channel grouping
to see the channels that were driving engagement.
Then you could also, let's say, if I was interested to know revenue per
country, I could go to metric and add revenue.
Now let's view this.
As you can see, our table has become quite overcrowded.
We could solution this with optional metrics.
Select your chart and in the properties panel, scroll down
and you'll find this option here, optional metrics.
To enable it, just enable the toggle.
Now what you'll notice is if you hover
your chart, you'll notice the optional metrics icon appearing.
To add optional metrics,
you can simply click here on add metric and find your dimension or your metric,
or we could also simply just bring the others in.
We can just drag them in this way, let's add it here.
Let's also add our revenue.
If you look at your chart now, they are not seen anymore.
However,
users now can just hover the chart and click on the optional metrics icon
and find the dimensions and the metrics that we added right here.
If I was, for example, to select revenue, it will now appear in the chart.
I can also remove any one
and therefore reduce the clutter in our dashboard.
It is worth mentioning here that you could
also do the same with other charts like this line chart.
Again, at its core, the cluttering is about making sure
that the user focuses on what matters the most.
How do you go about this?
Well, you can achieve this by first removing distractions and then reducing
user efforts to a maximum, down to scrolling if you can.
It's worth mentioning that decluttering
just for the sake of decluttering may not always be the way to go.
For example, financial dashboards may seem
a bit overcrowded, but they are still relevant to those who uses them.
You also have the case of tactical dashboards, which are dashboards that are
more detailed and that you share with your team compared to those that you share
with a CEO and that needs to be heavily decluttered for decision making.
All right, this was our perspective on the cluttering dashboards.
Now it is your turn to find what to clean up.
If you got any value from this video,
please consider liking it and share your thoughts with us.
Anyway, this was Eric from MeasureSchool and see you next time.