Introducing Metrics: A New Age of Enlightenment in Curator

Mark Bingham
January 8, 2024

In the rapidly evolving landscape of Analytics, it’s become paramount to give your users maximum flexibility while also delivering reliable and sophisticated insights.  Today, this means spending a huge amount of effort to create complex dashboards that consider all the variety of ways someone might want to see your data – all in the pursuit of empowering people to make well-informed data-driven decisions.

Today, we’re excited to introduce you to a revolutionary new approach to analytics, and BI in general, that is coming soon to Curator. It all begins with Tableau’s new feature: Pulse Metrics.

The landscape of BI has been undergoing a large-scale shift in recent years – a lot of the promise of “democratized data” has honestly been delivered, and we’re excited to see, and to be a part of, getting data to the right people quickly. But for every complex dashboard, we really wish there were simpler indicators. More canaries in the coal mine now that we’ve done so much exploring.

Metrics and How They Illuminate

Tableau Pulse’s Metrics, which will be integrated into Curator in the coming weeks, are a new way to interact with your data. They’re AI-Powered insights that are a full-scale re-interpretation of how to think about your massive amounts of data.

Disclaimer: If your dataset isn’t clean, then everything past here is going to be very painful. Reach out to our team if you need help with getting your data ready for Pulse Metrics.

Once you have your data ready, Metrics can be easily created either directly in Tableau, or in Curator. In the screenshot below, I’ve simply synced in an existing metric to Curator:

Metrics offer a simple tracking of individual data points. If you’re curious how sales are moving generally, or how the recent weekend’s ad impressions went – it’s the perfect high-level overview to see what happened. But here’s the amazing part: getting dynamic breakdowns.

A Dynamic Approach to BI

Historically Tableau has required a pre-defined dashboard layout to guide a user towards related data-points within a dataset.  This hard analysis is critical to discovering complex and sophisticated insights. However, not every use-case is sophisticated and hard-won, and some things are better left unstructured and open-ended. My favorite questions don’t have a clear answer – and now you can ask those open-ended questions using Tableau. The bottleneck of dynamic data presentation in Curator will allow for significantly more flexible design of data-driven “components”. This means dropping more data-related insights into your websites – like Curator! But there’s a big world beyond that, and the experts at InterWorks are happy to help discuss with you ways you can utilize Pulse metrics in your own app.

With Curator, this means creating metrics, then easily adding them to a page within Page Builder – or using our pre-built template page that renders metrics with ease:

Template Page:

Page Builder Selection:

How Metrics Enhance Curator

Once we can wrap our minds around this dynamic approach, it becomes clearer to see a variety of ways in which data can situate itself into different contexts on your site. A few simple examples are content and branding below – being able to drop a metric into a page that also has a hero image, and a big block of text. This gives you the ability to better situate your data inside of good context before they begin exploring:

Or branding: with a simple layout, the focus shifts away from the “dashboard” and into a single cohesive web-based experience extending your brand even further – reminding your audience the trust they put into you and your brand to deliver valuable insights:

And lastly: meeting people where they are. We’re hard at work now perfecting the way your users will receive email updates giving them insight and access to a specific metric right in their email, so they can check in daily/weekly – or even when the data set is updated!

We're excited to see how you use the new Metrics feature in Curator. By providing a way to embed Pulse Metrics directly into your Curator, we’re excited to see all the new and amazing ways you’ll be able to deliver valuable insights into your data.  We can't wait to see what you build!