Table cards are ugly

AS

All practicality, no romance. Information-dense, beauty-light. I'm seeing a lot of Dojo posts, including my own, where you are sharing your visuals. More frequently than I'd expected, those visuals are table cards. Does anybody really like table cards? As in, do you find them easy to digest and aesthetically pleasing? Something you're excited to share? Or do we just use them because they are super functional and pragmatic, despite their blandness, and they are an easy crossover from habitual Excel reports? What's your requirements and design process that gets you to the point where you say, "Yep, I better use a table card for that one."? Personally, we get there, I think, because that's what works in many cases (not all) for management. They want to see a grid of many datapoints. So I spend a fair amount of time writing up complex beast modes and/or dataflows to achieve that goal. Percentage of this. Compared to that timeframe. Over or under such and such threshold. I'm rambling here, but I wonder if there isn't a better way. Your thoughts are appreciated.

KaLin

This sounds like a great conversation to get started.  Does anyone have any input on the use of Table Cards to share with the rest of the community?

jlafee

We end up in a similar position at my company, where a story that could be told graphically in 2 or 3 chart cards end up in a single table card for easier export or quick data absorbtion.  

 

The secret we use is color series for gain/loss, so there is a real distinction between the ups and downs, and that draws the leadership team towards the graphs.  We also provide the key metrics they want in the summary of the card, so they can get the quick numbers, but also have additional visibility in the graphical data representations.

 

There are also several things that can be done in a beast mode to make a table card more interesting, such as adding graphics (performance icons or even bar fill).  Similar to what you can do in Salesforce or Excel, if something is hosted where you can access it from Domo, you can pull the image into the table.  There are several great posts about that already in the Dojo, and it was covered in the Advanced Beast Mode class at Domopalooza last year.  I'll see if I can find my notes or my sample cards from the event, it was pretty neat to see my tables with a little life in them.