UX Issues with Group Breakdown Controls in Campus Data Warehouse

The Campus Data Warehouse team is aware of usability issues with the Group Breakdown controls in QuickSight and is currently exploring alternative configurations.  Over the summer, we will test a few different options with selected users and the Data User Advisory Group to identify a more friendly user experience for these dashboard controls. Please stay tuned for more details and participate when we reach out to the user community for feedback.


 
Ticket: 24421822 
Service: Accessibility & User Experience (UX) / User Experience Design & Research
Date created: Mon 5/5/25 11:25 AM Pacific Daylight Time

Title: UX Issues with Group Breakdown Controls in Campus Data Warehouse

The way data grouping functionality on the dashboards was implemented with cascading dashboard controls in our new system (QuickSight) is not working well. It does not optimize searching for available grouping fields. Users frequently get confused about the steps that are involved in searching for and changing selections.

Overview of how the interaction is currently implemented:
  1. Users have to first select a "Category" for the Group Breakdown Uploaded Image
  2. Users then use a second "Group Breakdown" control to select from the available Grouping variables Uploaded Image
  3. The selected "Group Breakdown" field gets passed into the visualizations to group the dataUploaded Image

Users get confused about having to first select a category, and also that they cannot easily search the "Group Breakdowns" list since the "Category" control limits the values in the control to the available Group Breakdowns in that category. 

We have some different designs available for the interaction that I'm looking into, and we'd like to test 2-3 scenarios with potential dashboard users before we implement. At least 50% of our dashboards will need to be updated with the new design.

We plan on running the options by our Data User Advisory Group in our June 25 workshop, but we'd like to test sometime in mid-June with a few campus data users who may not have much experience with the data warehouse.

Requested by: Michael Dorsch
Created by: Michael Dorsch on Mon 5/5/25 11:25 AM Pacific Daylight Time