[Meta] Help users find a dashboard among all dashboards

[AlonaNadler]

This has been asked countless times and is a big cause for frustration for many companies.
Users have hard time finding the right dashboard between dozens and even hundreds of dashboards in the dashboard listing page. (btw I know Visualize listing page suffers from the same problem, I think it needs a different solution than dashboard)

Main problems:

• The alphabetical order currently been used is not helpful since users don't know the exact name.
• Companies don't know which dashboards are actually being used and which can be deleted which results in hundreds of dashboards to browse between
• Users open several dashboards till they find what they were looking for which leads to an unpleasant experience and load on ES which could be prevented
• Unable to find the right dashboard, the need to do trial and error opening a dashboard waiting for it to load and figuring that is not what you were looking for is a big friction point for our users and common task

Ideal solution:

• Ability to group by common topics dashboards and filter by them - sounds like tags
• Provide more metadata on the dashboards (some already exists in the JSON):
  • creation date
  • last update
  • created by (if using Elastic security)
• Ability to see the latest dashboards used per user, this exists on the home page but should be in the dashboard listing page instead and show only dashboards.
• Ability to mark as favorites and pin certain dashboards per space (like github pinning :) )
• Redesign to accommodate the new information in the listing page

@elastic/kibana-design @timroes @VijayDoshi @alexfrancoeur

[cchaos]

I'm just putting this out there, though the design is severely out of date now.

The basic concept is are:

• Give more "filter" capabilities via the faceting on the left.
• Allow "Tagging" of saved dashboards.
• Show created and update dates.
• More sort capabilities: viewed, updated, created, alpha

[dsmith001]

Three insights from when Tableau was tackling this problem with Tableau Server:

1. Not uncommon for a user to want to find a dashboard based on who the owner/author was ("Jane said she built a dashboard showing the monthly trend...where is it?")

2. It was shocking how many people looked for and found dashboards based on their appearance which we solved by adding thumbnails ("I need that one dashboard with the yellow bars")

3. More savvy users would sometime take the approach of trying to find dashboards based on which data sources(s) they were connected to. When we added the "show me all dashboard connected to X data source" capability it was a big hit and had the added bonus of helping administrators understand downstream impacts of updating/editing/deleting a data source.

[alexfrancoeur]

Thanks for filing @AlonaNadler! @jinmu03 this issue aligns with most of the saved object meta data features I had brought up during our sync earlier today. I'll go ahead and add this issue along with some related ones to the planning doc.

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-app (Team:KibanaApp)

[ryankeairns]

Alona notes that Viz has a similar problem (although it might need a varied solution) and I think you could put Canvas in that category as well. There are Canvas home page designs that evolved to align with Caroline's design above, fwiw.

As I think about it, it strikes me that all product home pages that currently use a table list view would likely benefit from the solutions described above. Not to bog down the process for Dashboard, but keeping in mind the the global usage would be wise.

[cchaos]

I mean really, if you think "globally", the whole page could be the same for everything, just filtered down to specific save object types. 😉 😉 :nudge: :nudge:

[snide]

This would be a fantastic usage of Pulse @TinaHeiligers. Essentially surface each users "most used" items first.

[VijayDoshi]

A huge ++ to this issue. Our content management approach is quite frustrating for our users.

I'd love to see thumbnails as Dustin points out; users can easily sort through a lot of information visually. I'd wager that even if you displayed hundreds of thumbnails (and nothing else) sorted by average color you'd be able to find what you are looking for if you have seen it before... that's a bit extreme but hopefully you see what I'm saying - humans are visual creatures, we should use that as much as possible.

Global Search should help this problem too.

If we do tags, we should consider a special tag to indicate an object is "certified" or "official" - the source of truth. These would typically be weighted in results to appear at the top if they are often used, an icon in the results also helps the user focus in on relevant content. The addition of "certified visualizations" resulted in huge cheers at Tableau's customer conference - no joke.

[timroes]

I want to link the relevant issues here:

• Tagging of saved objects (saved object tagging phase 1 #16484)
• Saved object meta-data (Ability to store meta data in saved objects #23430) (to track last updated, created, etc. in saved objects)
• Pined dashboards ([Feature Request] Starred Dashboards #39038)
• [potentially] per user settings (Per-user profiles, settings in Kibana #17888) (for making any of this user specific, like pinning)

Regarding thumbnails, this will be a bit trickier. Since not everyone with permission to view the dashboard would potentially have permission to see the data. So we can't simply make a screenshot of the dashboard when it's created/updated and use that as a thumbnail, since we can potentially leak data that way to users who have no permission to see it, but only permission to see the dashboard.

[VijayDoshi]

@timroes could we only show results in the list of objects you have permissions to?

[timroes]

@VijayDoshi we unfortunately can't. I mean you can check if you have permission to see the dashboard (and we of course don't show dashboards you don't have permission to), but whether you have permission to access (all) underlaying indexes is nothing we can check. E.g. you could have created a visualization on that dashboard, that uses metricsdata-* as an index pattern, and you only have part to 50% of the indexes matching that pattern. You'll still get a correct result from Elasticsearch, and won't even be noticed that you didn't got access to 50% of the indexes that could have been matched by that pattern (since that would again leak information to you).

So basically there is no chance of knowing for another user what data or what part of a data within what visualization they would be able to see. With document level security you could even potentially just see parts of the documents within specific indexes, and such would always be missing e.g. some specific rows in a table, with sensitive data in (e.g., because for privacy reasons you should not have access too all customer names, while the user who created that dashboard had access to the documents of all customer names). So we could basically only show you a screenshot that has been made exactly with your user, without the danger of leaking data to you, that you should not be able to see.

[jinmu03]

@alexfrancoeur This issue is on Platform team's 7.9-7.12 roadmap

[ruflin]

We load many dashboards from the ingest manager in the future. We have screenshots for our dashboards that we could also provide as a thumbnail to Kibana if it is supported.

[alexfrancoeur]

Screenshots would be an interesting addition, but in the past we've had concerns about them being too noisy. Definitely worth revisiting, I know @VijayDoshi has made similar suggestions for navigational search.

Generally, the need for additional metadata and a global tagging system seems to be growing, especially with new use cases being introduced such as EPM / ingest manager around the corner and features like "copy to space" that could copy over tagged saved objects (not just dependencies). As @jinmu03 noted, this is currently on the platform teams roadmap. cc: @joshdover for visibility

@ruflin with something like tagging in mind, I'd imagine we'd also want a consistent tag across alerts, ML jobs and more. Have you been thinking along these lines at all?

[ruflin]

@alexfrancoeur Yes. I think tagging in combination with meta data would be great. Meta data is not necessarily only to filter on but also for the user to indicate that some of the dashboards, ml jobs, index patterns are created and managed by EPM as an example.

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/appex-sharedux (Team:SharedUX)

[ThomThomson]

Reassigning this to the Shared UX team as I think that the content management initiative will cover this use case? Feel free to close this one if this information is covered in content management issues!