I've been super lax about blogging over the last year or so.
A combination of work, life and learning have overtaken the many series' I planned to follow over the last 12 months. Even my quantified self series fell off after a couple of months as I kept missing my deadlines - making time for this development is crucial, which I will endeavour to change.
I have, however been doing a lot of thinking.
And this thinking has been around the data field as a whole, as well as the space which Tableau & Alteryx sit in - the self-service, data to the people kind of space. And that's been a driver in why my series on style guides did indeed fall off the wagon, or get put on a back burner.
OK - explain.
The idea behind the series was simple. Talk about how and why enterprise organisations & general corporations use & create style guides, and discuss further how this can translate into Tableau - with the audience being anyone who was looking to scale out Tableau Desktop and make it the norm.
Now the motivations were sound - but I've been reflecting and reading a lot into a lot of Tableau's strategy, mission & of course, their awesome Drive methodology (it's a really good read for anyone in this space, in my opinion.)
When speaking at the Keynote for Tableau Conference 2014, Christian Chabot talked about innovation, creativity and empowering the users. In this keynote, Chabot talks about the great painters, that da Vinci didn't create his work by filling out a painting request form, or that Jackson Pollock didn't go round and show people how to splatter paint etc. He also mentions that traditional BI software was full of templates and wizards, but in reality insight comes from a creative flow.
So now I'm in two minds.
I completely agree with Christian - the creative and iterative flow is fantastic; but I also think that it's best when the user has a good solid base of what they should be looking to emulate. So does a style guide help, or restrict this? Whilst on my second placement, I had regular (and occasional heated) debates about this with my colleague Jules - who thought that restriction of any form defeated the object of Tableau. My thinking was, and to an extent still is, that Tableau shouldn't be shackled, but some direction (be it through colour palettes, icons/shapes which are custom for the company, fonts etc) should be shared.
But what about layouts?
One of my first blogs in this series was about homogenising style. Indeed, that's what the series should be about right? And when I look back at it, again I'm in two minds. On one hand, a unified approach to report building has always been the norm, and makes sense due to the familiarity and instance recognition. On the other - don't we want to disrupt this with a new way of thinking?
Is there room for both?
For a while I was working with a client helping build a Centre of Excellence - and during my research (which lead me to Tableau Drive.. seriously, if you want a great manual for enterprise strategy in this space, do not look any further) I found that style guides aren't that prevalent - but examples are.
A few of the CoE leaders I spoke to mentioned a 'Gallery' which effectively sounded a bit like Tableau Public, but for business/company specific dashboards. A user who was looking for layout, theme or general inspiration would be able to log onto a project on a Tableau Server and see what was going on.
So that's where I am - In two minds about whether a series on data visualisation style guides is useful, or whether it's something which is best in a hybrid approach with the worry being that a hard and fast rule would encroach upon Tableau's beliefs.
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