The UX with single-select filter boxes is kind of painful to use.
For me, the use case for this feature is to quickly switch between all-data views and one specific person, area, or store.
In other words, basically drill-down, but driver by a filter rather than having to waste dashboard space with a table listing the filterable values.
So being able to do this without a lot of clicks or a lot of space is key.
First, it seems like a bug to me that you have to have a value for single-select boxes, rather that “any value” being one of the options as for multi-select filter boxes.
Secondly, compare the sequence to select from this type of filter in most BI products, which show the drop-down box directly when you create this type of control:
- Click on the filter drop-down box
- Click on the value you want
Now in Holistics.io:
- Click on the filter box to bring up the filtering panel
- Click on the drop-down for the filter that you just clicked on (redundant)
2a. Wonder why there’s radio-button circles; ignore that - Click the value you want
3a. Wonder why the drop-down hasn’t closed up; see that the color has changed and the radio-button selected, so decide it’s probably OK - Wonder why nothing is happening
- Realise that the filter hasn’t actually been applied, because the filter panel hasn’t been submitted. But where’s the submit button?
- Click away from the drop-down to close it up, revealing the Submit button that was hiding underneath. (nb. Multi-select boxes don’t have this problem because it happens that the nested drop-down for the choice type - the one that says “is” by default - is wide enough that the actual value drop-down does not cover the Submit button).
- Click Submit.
So 5 clicks vs. 2 with most products, and not very discoverable, first-time users will get frustrated.
Next thing wrong, you can’t Submit a filter unless you’ve changed something - you must Cancel. Even if you changed a filter then changed it back! That seems totally unnecessary, and it makes it feel like you have something actually wrong with your selections. It’s not obvious to a user what cancel will do here (actually it’s fine in the end). This one applies to multi-select filters too.
While I’m on the subject, it’s kind of nice having Date drill as a normal, quick-to-use drop-down there by default on the right. But why not one for Date itself? It’s very, very common to want to filter a dashboard by date, in fact I would go so far as to say you want to do that on most dashboards.
