Palette Software provides an End-User Experience Management Solution for Tableau Software Server. Palette makes it easy for Tableau server admins and publishers to do more with Tableau Server.

OVERVIEW

PROBLEM STATEMENT

Although Tableau provides the best-in-class analytics visualization capabilities, the day-to-day management of a mission critical, 24/7 Tableau Server requires significant custom development to replicate industry standard capabilities for system health monitoring, alerting, data source availability, workbook versioning, and disaster recovery.

PROJECT GOAL

Palette's goal was to make it fast, easy, and cost-effective for Enterprise IT to deliver an exceptional Tableau Server experience.

MY ROLE

Researcher: Conducted interviews with Tableau users to understand their needs and pain points. Conducted usability testing on conceptual designs and validated the screens with users and led debriefing user feedback sessions.

Facilitator: Helped the developers to prioritize and define requirements by hosting design meetings everyday.

Interaction Designer: Created workflows and user interface specifications.

Visual Designer: Created visual specifications for developers.

Design Project Manager: Coordinated information between users, engineers and product managers. Helped plan and prioritize project timelines.

FINAL DESIGN

DESIGN PROCESS

PROBLEM STATEMENT

Admins Pain Points:

There is no enterprise grade system Monitoring or Alerting. So Tableau Admins are always worry about not knowing when an extract fails or a database connection drops or a Tableau Server Windows Process goes down.
Tableau is too labor intensive for daily tasks and troubleshooting which overwhelm Tableau single "Tableau Administrators".
No Automated Backup and Restore System.
No remote management capability.
Submit support cases to Tableau is not easy and time consuming.

Publishers Pain Points:

No rollback capability for Workbook Publishing.
No awareness of extract failures
Publishers are dependent on Admins to resolve any small issues
No capability to archive workbooks versions

GOALS

Palette goal is to make it fast, easy, and cost-effective for Enterprise IT to deliver an exceptional Tableau Server experience. Say hello to the concept of Tableau Server "User Experience Management".

For Admins:

Makes anyone a Tableau Server expert and eliminate labor shortage issues by automation.
Provide admins with a comprehensive single view and reduce server administration labor through automation like Real Time Monitoring and Alerts.
Alert admins to live data source connection issues, report generation long-durations/failures, system health issues
Automate 1-click restore/backup
Allow Sever Admins to check the status of Tableau Server from anywhere by any device.
Admins can submit a support case to Tableau from Palette with attached log files.

For Publishers:

Provide automated workbook version archive.
Empower publishers to independently self-service issue resolution
Alert publishers to report generation long-durations/failures
Alert publishers to extract failures
Archive publisher's workbook versions

DESIGN CHALLENGE

Make the system do the heavy lifting (Virtual Assistant)
Create a simple, elegant, intuitive and fun interaction
Meaningfully group information
Avoid complication... Don't make the user think
Make it scalable and brand-able
Ensure user can fulfill goals

DOCUMENTATION

Beautiful, accurate and delightful documentation can help illustrate user journeys, process flows and research outcomes. These documents were stored in Confluence to enable anyone at the company to learn about the process quickly.

Documented research outcomes.

Socialized design documents with stakeholders and colleagues to check for accuracy.
Created an internal knowledge base (confluence) for documents and findings to be uploaded as a reference for the team.