Communicating and remembering messages involves engagement and engaging an audience with a topic is one of the most important skills of a data analyst. An effortless way to engage someone with a visual display of data is to encourage them to manually play with it, thereby bypassing a persons’ short-term visual memory bottleneck and forcing the topic into their working memory.

Tableau offers a host of options for interaction with a viz, from applying a filter on the page to clicking on an image and seeing the view change or going to a drilled down version of the same information. Planning which interactions to use and in what order, then designing that into a viz takes time but it propels the experience to a higher engagement level and ensures the message is memorable.  

The vast majority of Tableau vizzes are interactive and designed with an end user in mind. You can view what possible interactive options can be configured by exploring how a viz changes when you perform an action, such as selecting a shape, following a link or hovering over it.

Ideally, it will be obvious how the author wants you to interact with a viz; often instructions are baked into the design or there might be a pop-up information sheet. It’s always good to look for instructions when you open a viz and when designing your own vizzes, think about how someone other than you would know where to go and what to do on the page.

| Image: Example of viz filtering options and display of information  |

You will now move on to the next step, where you can check your current knowledge on Tableau.