I always get back with a lot of ideas to apply to our projects and this time was not different; What was different is that I actually got hands down to implement it - a CDF jetpack:
The idea is to improve the user interaction with our dashboards. More than describe, I can show it with some pictures.
After I installed my jetpack, you can see in the status bar a new icon that will give the user access to some operations. If we click on any of the bookmarks we'll directly jump into the desired location. Alternatively we can start designing a new dashboard directly.
The jetpack automatically detects that we're in a CDF-DE dashboard. Then it shows more options - in this case we can edit it or even bookmark it.
After we give it a name, it will be stored and available in our personal bookmarks. Those bookmarks will be associated with the firefox user profile and persist between sessions.
Once in that page, we can also remove the bookmark from the list.
I don't know what others may think but I really like this beginning. Brings the user closer to the data, and there's a lot of stuff we could do here. If you have any idea just tell them - as wild as they may seem.
That's it for now. It's not the only idea we brought from Mountain View but that will be in another post. If you find this useful, we can include this jetpack in a future version of our designer.
One thing I was dreaming up about this extension on my flight home was the concept of dynamic bookmarks.
ReplyDeleteIf you are looking at a page that has been filtered or drilled-in, you could calculate a hashtag for the current state of the page and save that as the bookmark. Then, if CDF were changed to be able to understand those hashtags, they could be used to bookmark the page exactly as it was customized.
Very nice Pedro. I might also like to type in my report or dashboard and not have to browse.
ReplyDeleteWhat I do like about this approach is that it takes away the focus from the browsing of the Pentaho repository and places it back on the content. A novel idea :)
I like both the ideas! One problem with the typing is expose to the final user the dashboard/report name. The filename is not always visible.
ReplyDeleteBut I'll think of something.