Tableau Public — Luke Green

The problem

Public had last been redesigned in 2015 and the UI was starting to show its age. The issues, however, went beyond just the aesthetic. User research studies showed deficits in user engagement (show) and a desire within the community for new capabilities. We knew that we were under-delivering in terms of giving users new ways of showcasing their work and even finding job opportunties.

An unorthodox approach

Our team knew in their bones that Public was not living up to its potential, but our leadership was not necessarily prepared to invest in a full redesign. We knew we had to get buy-in first, so I suggested that we take what was, for us, a different approach. My recommendation was to develop high fidelity mock-ups of a visionary or ‘ideal’ state for Public to generate excitement for what the site could become and then undertake our typical, research-based design process as a second step.

This approach obviously involved risks and a lot of assumptions. We weren’t starting from rigorous user studies, but from years of accumulated feedback from our community and a deep intuition about how the site could be better. We wanted to provide a vision for what Public could be, something that went beyond our wireframes and specification documents, something that would excite our team and our customers and provide a north star for our design work.

I convinced our product leaders to give me and my team two weeks to develop a set of exploratory concepts that would help us make our case for project funding and set the stage for a complete overhaul of the site.

Wireframes

Now it was time to turn our attention back to some of the other core UX pain points and opportunities for new features.