We are hearing a growing number of complaints from users of our university Campus Data Warehouse about the Amazon Quick navigation experience, particularly the Dashboards page.
At the moment, users are presented primarily with a dashboard title and basic metadata such as when it was last updated. For a large enterprise environment with many dashboards, that is not enough information for someone to understand what a dashboard is for, what questions it answers, or whether it is the right resource to open.
We would really like to see a persistent dashboard-level description or summary field that authors or administrators can maintain for each dashboard. Ideally, that description would:
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Maintained by dashboard authors/publishers
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Appear directly on the Dashboards page and in folders/search results
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Be visible before a user opens the dashboard
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Be searchable along with the dashboard title
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Be accessible through the API for governance and maintenance
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Remain separate from dashboard version descriptions or release notes
For example, instead of a user seeing only:
Student Enrollment Trends
Updated 2 days ago
they could see:
Student Enrollment Trends
Enrollment, census, and demographic trends by term, college, department, program, and student population. Use this dashboard for historical enrollment analysis and comparisons across academic units.
This seems like fairly fundamental functionality for dashboard discovery and navigation that should be native to the Amazon Quick navigation interface. As the number of dashboards grows, relying on titles, folders, favorites, and timestamps places too much burden on users to already know what they are looking for. Putting explanatory material inside the dashboard does not solve the problem either, because the user has to choose and open the dashboard before seeing it.
For organizations using Quick as the analytics front door for hundreds of reports and dashboards, richer catalog metadata would make a significant difference in usability and adoption.
Are other organizations running into this issue? If so, how are you currently handling dashboard discovery? And is a dashboard-level description/summary field on the product roadmap for the Amazon Quick UI?