Tell us what your teammates need from your dashboards

AliM

As an Anaplan user tasked with helping your teams better understand their data through your Anaplan UX dashboards, we want to hear more about what your end users tell you. What kinds of visualizations are they are asking you for, what do they struggle with in accessing and understanding your data, and how you resolve those problems through your expertise and Anaplan tooling? By better understanding the problems you and your users are trying to solve, Anaplan hopes to support your work to the fullest. 

TimothyThomas

In general, the New UX provides a ton of the functionality that was a pain point with classic UX dashboards, but there are still a few minor display-related issues that come up with our end users from time to time. A couple are:

• Selective data labels: When working with complex charts, oftentimes there are requests to have data labels for certain parts of the chart and not others, because if all labels are turned on then it creates quite a mess. With these complex charts, we usually default to turning labels off so that the chart is readable. But it would be nice to be able to apply labels to individual dimensions of the chart!
• Spacing: The "snapping" features of the layout in the New UX are overall a net positive compared to the greater flexibility (but also sometimes annoying to line up) features of classic. But sometimes, it does limit the ability to make things the exact size that end users want. We end up using lots of blank text cards to circumvent this, but certain sizing is just not quite possible.

 

I'm sure there are others, but those are just what popped in my head at first.

HollyRieke

Thanks for the feedback!

tomgilbert

hi - my stakeholders would like better formatting for chart labels. Some of the charts we are able to put together are 99% of the way there, but they lack the final polish of something created in excel. These slight formatting issues might seem small, but they act as a real barrier for full adoption by our execs.

For example, the chart labels can become cluttered. Additionally, the text is automatically outlined in white. We would love to have the ability to control the text outline color so that it better suits the color scheme of our charts. Here is a picture of the white text outline I'm referring to:

Hopefully charts can become more "presentation ready" in the future. Even if not using Anaplan for a full presentation, if the charts themselves are a little more polished they can be exported and dropped into a powerpoint.

luke_e

EDIT: I only noticed after posting that this original thread is from a few years ago, but the below still applies to the current state of the NUX.

Wall of text below, but I think from our point of view being a longer term customer who built everything in classic, is that there still isn't technically parity with functionality from classic, in the NUX.

There are some great new additions in NUX, but there's some seemingly glaring omissions not limited to,

• Inability for users to apply filters to cards using other modules (e.g. users can only filter based on lines within the card/specific module). This was used significantly in classic.
• Users also can't see what filters have been applied to cards by WSA/page builders, nor can they remove them.
• Show/hide only works with what WSA/page builders have published in the custom view and can't view any other lines within the source module.
• No default value apart from 'use top level as default'.
• No open source view for non WSA-users.
• Context selector filtering is.. problematic. If you select levels to show on a page-level context selector to remove the leaf, and the list is set as a page dimension in a card, it's impossible to review the leaf info in the card (it just doesn't appear).
  • To be clear, this is only an issue if the list is set as a page dimension in a card (which is common for us when reviewing individual objects in detail).
  • This was/is a huge issue for us and makes progressive disclosure in pages quite difficult, especially if you want to start at a high-level with supporting detail further down.
• Inconsistent common functionality across pages
  • We can filter context selectors in boards/worksheets, but not report pages?
• Line item formatting doesn't seem to be respected in NUX
  • All lines seem to appear as bold. The only different seems to be indents.
  • In lists, leaf-level data is also bolded along with parents which makes visually reviewing harder. Classic typically made it clear what was leaf and what was a parent.
• Managing model connections
  • Changing page model links is painful. One page at a time and if you happen to archive a model, you need to go find the model, unarchive, re-point and rearchive. Not ideal.

Whilst the intent behind the NUX may be to push some of these use cases to My Pages (which introduces compliance & uniformity of output issues), I think as the WSA, we should be able to control (like in classic) whether users can use this functions on a card by card basis. e.g. We can control whether 'open source module' appears as an option.

We have a more detailed list which we're working through with our local Anaplan team, but we've found it difficult to transition a userbase of 400+ to an interface where functionality they're used to is no longer available.