Tableau lives of its interactivity. It’s one of the features which makes using Tableau fun and can generate an interactive user experience instead of just simply displaying graphs.
Letting the user decide what interests him
By generating an interactive visualization you provide the viewer the possibility to discover the data him- or herself. This way your viz is able to provide much more information and it can be chosen specifically which parts of the data are of interest for the user.
It also encourages the user into engaging further with the data and taking a look at what really interests them at this point. If the required information changes the shown visualizations can be changed with just a few clicks.
It is important to set a default setting for the user. What is he or she going to see when the visualization is opened? Here you can display a regular dashboard like you would do without the additional interactivity, but you still provide the possibility to look deeper into it - if the user is interested in doing so.
You could potentially provide sales data within many different countries or city’s and let the viewer choose himself if he has any particular interests or maybe just likes to see the total data summed up. A simple click on each country or city then could change the displayed sales data depending on the selected region.
A great tool in Presentations
The interactivity features are also a great tool to use within presentations. The audience can see the information change and understand the relations within the data more easily.
Often in presentations slides are just shown and the data is presented and talked through. But with the interactivity features you do not only get an explanation to the data by what the speaker is saying, you can also see where the information comes from.
If you want to present data specific to one country within a presentation you can just make a quick selection within Tableau and see the whole dashboard change if it is worked out well. This way it is easy for the listener to understand what is actually the topic, even if he or she isn’t to concentrated on the presentation. This feature helps you keeping your audience attention which is a huge plus for any presentation.
Through the interactive features, it almost feels like your visualizations come to life.