Tableau Global Navigation

Research

Because no large-scale, research-backed redesign of Tableau.com's global navigation had been done before, the initial research priority was to capture as much customer and prospect feedback as possible before repeating the process for the business perspective with representatives from our sales, marketing, and product teams.

Research methods

• Card sort: participants organized virtual cards labeled with existing and proposed pages linked in the navigation

• Tree jack: using multiple iterations of the new navigation, we saw how visitors might search for certain information

• Qualitative survey and interviews: questions about our current navigation and potential future options.

The initial testing was done at Tableau’s annual customer conference and, later, through remote usability tests and surveys. In total, we had over 300 participants. The questions can be summed up in the following three areas:

• What do you use the current global navigation to accomplish?

• How easy is it to accomplish those things?

• What would help you more easily or more completely achieve your goals?

After gathering customer and prospect feedback, we began our internal research, largely through interviews conducted on site at Tableau’s offices. These interviews allowed us to pair business goals with the goals of our site's users.

Based on our findings, the goals for the project were as follows:

• Ensure that the categories at each level of the navigation reflect not only what is on the page to come, but that the sub-category levels of the navigation are assigned appropriately to the level above.

• Identify gaps and redundancies between the new and old navigation structure and create or update pages to fill those gaps.

  • Pages to be updated or created:

    • Why Tableau (new) – Why Tableau is an industry-leading product; why and how it provides value to businesses.

    • What is Tableau (new) – A page detailing the company’s mission, its history of innovation, and its values and priorities for the business and for its place in the world.

    • Our Customers (new) – Supplements and links to an existing case study listing page; feature the latest or most impactful customer stories.

    • Our Platform (new) – Provides an overview of the Tableau Platform, its suite of products; demonstrates how the platform is used strategically to drive analytics adoption and prowess within an organization.

    • Our Products (update) – Breaks down the individual products in brief and acts as a hub for deeper product information and supplementary offerings; includes buying and bundling information.

    • Our Integrations (new) – Information about Tableau’s native data connectors and software partners; also provides insight about embedding and Tableau extensions.

    • Solutions (updated) – Bring the Solutions landing page into the visual design standards of the other new and updated pages; offered context about how Tableau helps customers across disciplines and industries.

    • Resources (new) – Brings together the resources, broadly speaking, that Tableau users can access to learn the products, join the community of power users, attend conferences and other events, and get product support.

    • Reference Materials (new) – A hub for data visualization thought leadership in the form of whitepapers and articles, as well as Tableau news.

• Make finding deeper content easier.

• Create a better process for future additions to the navigation.

To  achieve the goals above, we broke the redesign into two parts.

1. Navigation structure and usability: Find a solution for displaying deeper, more specific content without losing categorical coherence.

2. Page content, look and feel: Once properly categorized, ensure that the pages being linked tell a coherent story, fit together with similar design patterns and CSS widgets, and create easy paths into Tableau.com.

Navigation structure

From the card sorting exercises and interviews, I arrived at a taxonomy for the navigation that accommodated existing business concerns such as a focus on the “Tableau Platform,” added top-line categories like “Why Tableau” and “What is Tableau” to replace the more generic “About” with something more active (wording drawn directly from research), and moved items like “Learn” and “Community” under “Our Platform” and “Why Tableau,” respectively, to make sure the top-level of the navigation contained the broadest categories and to avoid lumping unlike things together.

However, because the navigation had only two levels, quick links to oft-used spaces within “Learn,” “Community,” and other top-level-now-secondary categories that had existed before would be lost. This was a problem because it went against the research’s emphasis (from both internal and external users) that the navigation’s links already lacked context.

After gathering feedback on these and other sections with similarly strong effects on business and customer priorities, I came to two conclusions:

• The best solution would be a major change in the navigation's functionality and a complete overhaul of its UI in order to keep top-level categories near the top-level without sacrificing future flexibility. One suggestion that I found particularly appealing was to implement a mega menu centered around the top tasks for users on Tableau.com. 

Unfortunately, from an leadership prioritization perspective, this plan was infeasible. So…

• Another solution was to enact a less major but still robust expansion. After considering possibilities like a left-side navigation –  shut down over engineering bandwidth and similar prioritization roadblocks – or simply a longer string of top-level navigation links – rejected as overwhelming based on earlier user testing – we decided to add a third level of navigation. 

This would allow for almost the same ease of access to spaces like “Community” and “Learn” while creating space for deeper linking under those and other existing second-level categories in order to better contextualize what was being offered in each section of the site. 

This solution also kept the top-level navigation concise and sustainable. Concise, because it limited the number of top-level items; sustainable, because when new items are added to the navigation as business priorities or offerings change, the top-level items would not need to change with them. If left open to ad hoc changes, a constantly shifting top-level of navigation might hinder returning users' ability to find their way to previously easily accessible resources. That said, by limiting the number of top-level links, we also left open the possibility for additions when unforeseeable events necessitate them – a COVID-19 set of pages, for instance, was added shortly after the new navigation went live.

Below,  you can see the structure as it existed prior to the redesign, the original post-research proposal, and how it ended up after several rounds of approvals on the business side.

Global navigation prior to this project

• Two levels of navigation

• Categorization of secondary items isn’t always coherent

• Top-level don’t necessarily create enough secondary options

• User-friendly content, like “Learning,” “Support,” and “Community,” is easily accessed but the navigation lacks an organizing structure that might better contextualize those pages

Global navigation, prototype of initial proposal

• Three levels of navigation to allow for deeper linking and more context

• New labels that address common user questions

  • “Why Tableau”; “What is Tableau”; “Resources”

• New label to address new business approach

  • “Our Platform”

• Limited number of broad, top-level items to help with categorization now and in the future

• Notable reorderings:

  • Move product-related items under “Our Platform” – i.e. “Learn Tableau” and “Support”

  • Group general company information under “Why Tableau”

  • Use “Resources” to house watchable and readable thought leadership content

• UI notes:

  • Indicate menus open; indicate clickable text; indicate open menus

Key feedback

• “Products” should be the top-line item, rather than “Our Platform”

  • Switching “Products” for “Our Platform” in the initial proposal was meant to bridge the gap between how Tableau wanted to talk about itself as it expanded its product suite and how it was perceived by users. The stakeholders on this project thought completely removing “Products” from the top-level was a bridge too far; considering that the term itself may have confused users, this made sense.

  • Once “Our Platform” became a secondary item, the stakeholder and I agreed that grouping items in the way I had suggested no longer made as much hierarchical sense so “Products” remained essentially the same, with only the addition of “Our Platform” to the secondary level.

• “Partners” should be a top-level item

  • Partner networks are a key way Tableau is sold, especially internationally. I did not include it in the top-level initially because it was not a broad category and had a limited number of links it could house.

• “Resources” should include all educational material, the all-up customer stories page, and all community and events material, which should be separated.

  • This feedback was largely driven by product marketing, as they felt the “Products” menu item should only include direct product information. While I disagree with that approach, I also understood where they were coming from and the research only indicated that users had trouble finding these items, not that they ought to live with product information specifically. While I had wanted to avoid using “Resources” as a dumping ground for anything resembling a resource, it wasn’t wholly inappropriate and could be shifted around in future iterations after more targeted research.

Published navigation

Once we had agreed on the categorization, I applied the new navigation into a test version of Tableau.com – our standard practice for troubleshooting and demonstrating the use of something new or globally significant on the site. Once QA was complete, it went live on Tableau.com. Because we used a test site, I didn’t make a new prototype, but you can see the functionality in action on Tableau.com, albeit with some new links and slightly different design elements that have been adopted since this project wrapped in the spring of 2021.

Because some items I had initially deprecated or omitted were deemed necessary to include for business purposes, I wasn’t completely able to avoid having top-level items that, effectively, acted as repositories for difficult to categorize items – the top-level item “Resources” and secondary item “Reference Materials” do a lot of heavy lifting, while some items I wanted to align with our product information were deemed less relevant to a more rigid reading of what that heading should include – basically, information about the products themselves only, rather than product-related items like “Support” or “Learning.”

That said, I’m happy with the results of this project as it not only improved the usability of Tableau.com, it also set the internal precedent I’d hoped for by giving the navigation a clear proprietor (my team and, in practice, me) and a direction informed as much by user research as business and marketing priorities.

Supporting pages

As mentioned above, our new navigation structure called for the creation (or update) of ten supporting pages.

I’ve chosen a sampling below.

Why Tableau

Our research indicated that newcomers to the site weren’t able to find a coherent overall value proposition for Tableau as both a company and a suite of products. 

This page (which, as you see above) also became a top-level navigation item with secondary links out to pages with our best and/or latest customer stories, an explanation of what Tableau is (another common issue in user tests), and a space for the existing “About” section which housed pages that detailed the company’s history, mission, and job openings.

The page’s design followed this structure in some ways. For instance, strong, contextualizing content blocks near the top help describe Tableau’s value both within the products and beyond, with links further down the page to customer stories and resources to help a prospective user become more familiar with Tableau and modern business intelligence more broadly.

Products

One issue facing this project was how best to weave the language around individual products (uses, integrations, benefits) with that of the larger Tableau “platform” of which they are all a part. Prior to this redesign (see below at far left), the page attempted to describe the Tableau platform and its constituent products using an unwieldy interactive component known internally (and unkindly) as “the layer cake.” While the layer cake was apparently effective in sales presentations or other proctored situations, a visitor to the website, without context, might not be able to take away the necessary information – this was mentioned in the research and, perhaps, unsurprisingly, came up in internal testing too.

The “Products” page, (known as “Our Products” in earlier iterations of this project) was designed to separate the platform part of the layer cake from specific product information and to include more context around each product with an introduction to the buying experience earlier in a user’s Tableau journey (see the “Analytics tailored to your team” section). Because Tableau’s software packaging structure has changed quite a bit over the years, the buying experience can add another layer of potential complexity and confusion if introduced at the end of a user’s experience (the pricing page in most cases) and without much explanation of the products themselves and how they relate to and differ from each other.

To this end, each section’s heading refers to the task the product being described is meant to help the user accomplish. This makes a list of products into a list of actions; the layout sequence is also, roughly, the sequence with which Tableau’s products are used. I wanted visitors to this page to not only come away with product information but an idea of the entire product ecosystem and its jobs to be done. This differs from the goal of the “Our Platform” page, which, by comparison, deals more with how the products as a whole form the basis for a given organization’s analytics strategy.

Another important but internal aim of this page was to move the conversation between the web team (my team) and the product marketing team towards a larger redesign of the Products-Platform web experience. That project was launched soon after the new navigation launched and was wrapped up in early 2022.

Solutions

The existing “Solutions” page served mainly as a conduit to case studies and other customer testimonials and featured a clunky “drawer” at the top that required any updates to “Solutions” content (new pages, new phrasing, etc.) to be changed there as well – not easy to do without admin access and more than a passing knowledge of HTML. We have since begun a redesign of each “Solutions” category, the first to be completed, “Tableau for Industries,” you can read more about here.

For this foray into overhauling “Solutions,” I removed the drawer and broke out its sections in uniform modules down the page. This provided greater context and the addition of more customer quotes (a stakeholder favorite and approved by our user research). Featuring “Tableau Blueprint” in this section of the site also helps tell a more complete story of how Tableau can help an organization approach its analytics and business intelligence strategy by giving users an action to get started (taking the “Tableau Blueprint Assessment” or learning more about the implementation of Tableau) once they’ve had a chance to review the customer evidence and industry-, department-, or technology-specific information.

Like “Products” I wanted to expand on the nominal offerings and give visitors a sense of what the idea of “solutions” meant in this context. Therefore, rather than just “Industries” or “Tableau for Industries” as a header, the design called for a descriptive title like “How different industries use Tableau for business intelligence” that would, ideally, engage the reader. Prior versions of the page (seen below at far left) provided zero context besides “[name of industry] analytics,” which, in keeping with our overall approach to this project, wasn’t serving users or our business well.

Future plans

Launching this new iteration of the navigation was a big step forward for usability and way-finding on Tableau.com. We continue to test alternatives, like the mega menu, to this structure as well as how we might further refine what tasks the menu ought to help users perform. I have also begun work on an internal set of guidelines to define clearer standards for how we use and augment the navigation regardless of the exact interface.