Context

What is Looker?

Looker is a modern BI platform that helps users explore, analyze, and share their business metrics easily. Users should be allowed to self-service and extract insights about their company data quickly and confidently.

Binning is a common methodology used by analysts to interpret raw and continuous data. In the Explore, we introduced a new way of visualizing the binning experience so that analysts don't have to write complex nested IF statements. The UI is good, but there is room for improvement.

impact

Why it matters

Users didn't know what they were getting when they were using the interface. How many bins are returned when they put in a number for bin size? What number should they put? Should they manually calculate it? The choice of bins impact a histogram’s appearance. Running queries impact both cost and system performance. We wanted to avoid trial-and-error.

There was also feedback from users that the editor was confusing and buggy. Could we design a more user-friendly editor?

This project was interesting because we explored the dynamics of automation vs manual work. We found that when we allowed users to make all sorts of changes to their bins, it made the interactions really messy because one input field would affect the other input field. Instead, we made the trade-off of simplifying the process for users.

We ran a moderated research study where users were delighted by the pre-generated bins.