Giving a dashboard a good title - Tableau Tutorial

- [Instructor] Let's talk about titles. Now, titles for a dashboard can often be overlooked or seen as you know, just perfunctory rather than really important. But actually they can really make or break a dashboard. Now, when you think about it, the title is one of the first thing that the viewer sees when they open up a dashboard. Now they're going to see all the charts, colors, different chart types that you've used, the layout, filters, everything else. But the first thing they're actually going to interact with and read is going to be the title, because the title's going to show you what it is you're going to be seeing. And the title sets the scene for the rest of the dashboard. Now, the title itself does a number of different things. So it's going to inform the viewer of the subject, you know, what is it that we are looking at? What is it that we are expected to do with that dashboard? It can often inform the viewer of the scope of the dashboard. Now, if the dashboard is showing only, say the last two years worth of data, having that in the title informs the user even before they've interacted with any of the charts, looks at any of the filters or access or legends, what the scope is. If you're looking at a subset of data that's really useful to put that into the title. So the title should be something that says, this is what this dashboard shows. So by the time you've finished interacting with the dashboard, this is what you should be able to understand or see or make a business decision on. What you're going to get from the dashboard is actually what the title tells you. So it can be a really important method for aiding the understanding and making sure that you understand what the dashboard is showing you much faster than just interact with the dashboard that says, here is the data. Now, from the designer point of view, it's also really useful actually, when you are building the dashboard itself. If you start with the title and have a good descriptive title, then everything that you do, every sheet that you create, every design decision that you make, kind of goes back to that title. Does everything in that dashboard fit with the title? If the title says, we're only looking back two years, then why am I showing three years worth of data? If the title is suggesting that by the end of the interaction with our dashboard, we should have this particular understanding, then is that true? When we get to the end of the dashboard, have we succeeded in what the title was telling us we were going to do? So a title isn't just something that you should just have. It's actually a really useful tool that can really aid the understanding. Think of it this way, a good title is a good start to a great dashboard, and we'd be quite foolish not to make the most of it. Let's see how titles work in practice. So in this example, I've got three sheets in my dashboard. Now the dashboard name at the bottom tab is called dashboard one. And all of my charts have the name, which is given to them in that same tab at the bottom. So profit, timeline, heat map, et cetera. Now, the dashboard itself isn't shown the title at the moment. So if I go to dashboard option at the very top of the screen and do show title, we now have my dashboard title, which by default inherits the name of the tab. Now those four titles are useless. I mean, they're not helpful at all. So we have to make a decision about do we even need to have the titles? So profit map, is that helping? I mean, I clearly can see it's a map. Do I know it's profit or not? The heat map, again, it's telling me the type of chart it is. Same as the timeline or the scatterplot, if we were to use that chart instead. So I don't need to know what the chart type is, but it's useful now and it's looking at profits. I've got my legends, I've got filters, I've got all the other elements I might have in my chart. All of those could also have titles. Now, do we need all of those or not? And if we think about what we're trying to do with our dashboard, it's to inform people about things within the data. So are those titles helping? Well, in this case, they're not, are they? Let's be honest. So what do we do about it? I would say that general as a rule, every dashboard should have a title. Okay? It sets the tone, it tells you what you're going to see, what you're going to be looking at, what the data might show, and what the dashboard is for, what we should be able to get from the dashboard. After we've explored it, looked at it, interacted with it, what should we take away with us? So to change the dashboard title, we have two options. We can either change the name of it in the bottom tab, so I might want to change it and call it profit dashboard. Okay, that's a better dashboard title. Slightly better. Not a great one, but it's slightly better because now it's telling me at least we're looking at profits. The fact it's telling me it is a dashboard, which is superb, just 'cause I know it's a dashboard. So again, we might want to do something more involved. Now we don't have to just stick with whatever we've called it in the bottom tab. If we go to the top of the dashboard and double click on the title, we get our editor window and I can put any title I like in it at all. So what would be a better title for this dashboard? Well, we're looking at profits and losses across all of our regions products across our entire dataset. So the dashboard is an exploratory dashboard and it's going to be answering the question or how do our profits and losses vary across our customers? Okay, so why not call it that? How do our profits and losses vary across our customers? We can change the title colors, we can change the boldness, we can change this to format it anyway that we like. So hit apply. Make sure it looks okay. Hit okay. Okay, so now I've got a slightly better title. How do our profits and losses vary across our customers? So that single sentence actually tells us quite a lot about what the dashboard is showing us. We know we're looking at profits and losses. Okay, so it already tells that this is a profitability dashboard. We're looking to see how it varies. Okay? So we know that there's some differences across our customers. So it's a customer focused dashboard, okay? Which makes sense if we look at the map, that's where our customers live. If we look at the heat map, it's what products are our customers buying and whereabouts, which one of those regions it is. And then timeline is going to be, well, when are our customers making those purchases? Okay? So that single line has changed the entire focus of the dashboard. If instead of that we wanted to make it a more informative dashboard, then we could change the title to be something like that. So the title can tell you a lot about the data, about the scope, about what we should get by the end of it. Now, when it comes to titles, we've got three other titles here, we have our profit map and our heat map. Well, now we know the entire dashboard is profit and losses. Do we need those titles at all? Probably not because they're just telling us the type of chart it is. Now I want to keep those names in the bottom tab because that's useful for organizing my particular workbook. I want to know what they are. But in terms of the final person using this dashboard, probably not. So as they are, they're not helping, could we get rid of them? Should we change them? That's something we have to think about. We'll look about removing chart junk in another video where we look to see is it adding anything or can we take things away? And certainly titles are a very good one. A good title is a good asset to keep, but a bad title is just taking up space. Titles are often overlooked and people kind of just put a very perfunctory title in there as almost as a text box exercise. But the good titles, the really good ones can turn a good dashboard into a great dashboard.