User Flow: Drill Down Insights

JoeM · ‎02-28-2022

Introduction

This article explores drill-downs and discusses best practices when allowing users to view data at different granularities.

Applies to

These concepts apply to version 4.8 and above of Incorta for customers implementing Incorta on-premises or in their own cloud and versions 2013.1.1 and above for those using the Incorta Cloud.

Let's Go

What are drill-downs?

Drill down capability is an action you can apply to a dashboard to allow dashboard consumers to select a piece of data and inspect the underlying data more closely. More often than not, drill down functionality is tightly coupled with hierarchical data. A few examples of typical uses for drills downs would be to view data by:

Geography: Continent --> Region -->Country -->State/Province/Territory -->City

Temporal: Year --> Quarter --> Month --> Day --> Hour

Business Rules: Product Category --> Sub-product category --> Product

When drilling into data, Incorta will apply two actions:

1) The granularity of the visual will be updated to a more detailed child view

AND

2) Only the details related to the parent selected will be viewable.

If the Product 'Bike' were selected to be 'drilled down' from this list, we would have the child values of 'Mountain Bike' and 'Road Bike' return in the resulting visual.

Category	Subcategory
Bike	Road Bike
Bike	Mountain Bike
Toys	Doll
Toys	Race Car
Toys	Ball

Drill down options

There are a couple of different experiences you can create as a dashboard designer:

1) Allow a user to select the value in a graph and:

a) Allow the graph to drill down on itself
b) Allow the graph to move the user to a different drill-down view

2) Allow a user to select the value in a table move the user to a different drill-down view.

Note: when moving users to different views, you can select entirely different dashboards or tabs.

Best Practices

Indicate the Chart has a Drill Down

Consumers may not understand how to leverage the capabilities of your dashboard without a bit of guidance. On any dashboards with drilling capabilities, use the description of the insight to signal how a user can interact with the insight.

Give Options

It's possible to allow users to drill down and drill across. Giving two options will allow more freedom for a consumer and free the developer to create multiple insights around a subject.

Structure Data Appropriately

Understanding your data as the end-user understands the data will elevate the drilling experience. If you have the dimensions: City, State, Burrough, ZIP Code, County, District, Block Group, interviewing a consumer on expected analytics usage will vastly improve the selection and ordering of components in your drill down.

Optimize Flow and Content Organization

In many cases, creating many different detailed dashboards and tabs can clutter your content structure. You might expect your consumers to want to open detail views without entering through a parent dashboard. In these cases, we recommend creating a separate folder to house drill down content.

Tabs vs. Dashboards

Determine how accessible you would like your drill down views. If the expected behavior of users is to jump right to the details, lean towards tabs. On the other hand, if you would like a 'gated' entry to the details through a dashboard, a separate dashboard will likely be the better choice.