4 Ways to Increase User Adoption with Curator

Ben Bausili
Global Experience
Practice Director
September 23, 2022

You've invested a lot of money in your analytics platforms. Expert analysts have spent time developing dashboards. Maybe you have even created a center of excellence to help facilitate your company's analytics culture. All these things are great, but perhaps you're still disappointed in the user metrics for how many people visit your dashboards.

Make the Experience Feel Fast

One of the most common complaints we hear is that dashboards are slow. Nothing can replace building efficient dashboards, but you don't have to have a fast dashboard for it to feel fast. We can play with the perception of speed with a few design tricks.

An old story goes that residents of a building kept complaining about the speed of the elevators. The engineers solved the problem by adding mirrors, and the complaints stopped. Did the mirrors make the elevators faster? Of course not, but they did distract the residents while they fixed their hair or adjusted their outfits. Changing waiting time from passive to active makes all the difference in the world.

That's why Curator comes with features to help:

1. Custom Loading Screens. We make it easy to add custom loading screens. These loading animations can help reinforce your brand while providing a fun distraction to end users. For maximum impact, change these up periodically and use a variety of them.
2. Thumbnail Loading Screens. You can also change that loading screen to a thumbnail of the dashboard. Users aren't ready to interact immediately, often needing time to read and orient themselves. Take advantage of that time while the interactive version loads in the background.
3. Tutorials. Use loading times to instruct the user with a tutorial. Curator tutorials can be powerful, multi-page guidance that incorporates text, images and even highlights of a dashboard image to provide the best possible instruction. Better still, the dashboard loads transparently behind the scenes.

Make the Content Relevant

For many companies, their analytics platforms have become the Wild West. While users expect relevant content to be at their fingertips, they get development, production and obsolete content intermixed together. It is an impossible task for users to sort through. Curator helps cut through the noise by allowing you to quickly and easily make a trusted area for your analytics. Not only that, but you know the place you consume production reports is visually distinct from the site where you produce dashboards, helping build trust and reliability in your data and processes.

Taking a step further, Curator enables you to customize the experience of navigating the content. You're not tied to the physical location of the content (or the server, site, or project it's on) – you can organize it any way you see fit! You can even have content live in multiple locations in a menu if that makes sense to your users. You can create landing pages for content by topic or department. You can leverage our automatically generated keyword pages to bring together relevant content. There are many options, but the important thing is that you can make the content more relevant to your users by organizing it in a way that makes sense to them. Dive deeper into our navigation options in this blog by Caleb.

Make the Style Consistent

Consistency and style are essential to any brand, but they can also impact the adoption of your analytics. One of the leading indicators to users that something is trustworthy is how it looks. Your dashboards never get a second chance at a first impression. Spend the time to make your dashboard look clean and professional. You don't have to go over the top with style (though that can be worthwhile to get attention); you just need to follow some basic guidelines. Curator makes this job easier by helping you apply consistent, global styles around your dashboards and the experience leading up to them. The good news is that you don't have to be a designer or web developer; Curator gives you easy-to-use tools to apply styles. Check out this overview of our style and brand features.

Bring It All Together

Even as an expert, it can be hard to keep track of all the reports, datasets, tools, presentations and documentation across the entire BI ecosystem. Add to that the numerous communication platforms that people use to send links and files, and it gets complicated fast. Curator helps reduce the complexity for you and your users by creating a single place to integrate everything you care about together. Search across reports from Tableau, Power BI, Qlik, ThoughtSpot and more. Add data dictionaries or a data presentation right to your site.

Having all this content live on a single site, and discoverable via a single navigation is a vast improvement. Curator also allows you to leverage each tool for its unique benefits. With Page Builder, you can combine multiple tools into a single webpage. This allows for unique experiences, such as navigating a Tableau dashboard while searching the same dataset via ThoughtSpot before writing back to the database with Sigma. Unifying your analytic platforms enables a best-of-breed analytics approach that will empower your users to do more with their data.

Conclusion

If you would like to know more about how Curator can help you increase user adoption, or you'd like to discuss other ways InterWorks can help your data culture, please reach out today!