When you develop a dashboard for your organization, it is a best practice to do a UAT (User Acceptance Test) before publishing it. This ensures that your users have accepted the solution you made and can happily use it to do their work.
Some dashboards are made for large groups of people. You cannot take in everybody’s feedback and approval before you bring it live, else it might never be done. A UAT is therefor often done on a subset of users. But sometimes you want to know more. What percentage of users is satisfied? Can they answer their data questions? Is an old dashboard still relevant?
For these type of questions - the ones after a dashboard is published and live - a feedback button can be very useful. In this blogpost I will describe how to add simple feedback buttons to your dashboard using URL actions and a Google form.
Use a button that pushes the score and username to the google form. The button holds a URL action that is being filled with parameters and a pre-filled google form submission link.
1. Create a google form with 2 questions:
2. In Tableau, create a calculated field: user = USERNAME()
3. Now create a parameter, type String, that will be filled-when-workbook-opens by the username calculation.
4. Make a placeholder calculated field: Placeholder = ‘X’
5. Make sure you have the shapefiles needed for the feedback buttons and add them to your Shapes folder in this location: C:\Users\...\Documents\My Tableau Repository\Shapes
6. Create 1 sheet, change the marks card to Shape. Place the Placeholder field on Shape and assign the correct smiley-shape-file. Hide the title and duplicate this sheet 4 more times and change the shape. Rename the sheets according to the emotion (very unhappy = sheet 1, love it = sheet 5).
7. Add a Vertical layout container to the dashboard and add all 5 sheets side by side.
8. Now we jump back to the google form, because we need the prefilled form link. Find it by clicking on the 3 dots and selecting Get pre-filled link (see image)
9. Fill in a test response and click the buttons to get the URL. Copy and Paste it to somewhere you can edit it:
So: https://docs.google.com/forms/[...formid..etc...]/formResponse?usp=pp_url&entry.1220184071=5&entry.1230800772=mirjam&submit=Submit
10. Now go back to your Tableau dashboard. Click on Dashboard > Actions, add URL action. Select sheet 1, Run on Select, paste the URL and change the values of the prefilled link so that it will contain ‘1’ and the username parameter (see image for example with sheet 2)
Create 5 seperate URL dashboard actions for all 5 sheets, by changing the number manually in the hyperlink (see image). So Sheet 2 will have a URL Action with a hyperlink that contains ‘2’.
Of course you don’t need to collect usernames if you want the feedback to be anonymous. But it can be nice to be able to invite people for an open brainstorm session, or reach out via mail to get in depth feedback on why they are unhappy.
Another option is to add an open text field for feedback, recommendations or requests. Simply create a string parameter with current value ‘feedback or suggestions?’. Create a google form with an open question and get the pre-filled link. Show the parameter type-in box on the dashboard and place a shape-button sheet under it with the URL action that sends theparameter to the form.
That is up to you of course. You can connect a tableau workbook to the data of the google form, count the results and measure satisfaction. Maybe even put an alert on this results dashboard: if the average satisfaction drops below 3.5 receive an email alert and do an improvement cycle.
Now you can reach out to the unsatisfied people and include them in the requirement analysis on your next dashboard!
