Have been extremely busy after changing my job 5 months ago, but still (in my new job) getting to play around with sites using Adobe Analytics. I had a few months gap using Workspace, but now trying to take some time to learn and investigate what kind of updates Workspace has gotten on Summer. I’m in a new role in my new job and responsibility is the whole digital analytics field in a very big company going through it’s digital transformation. Anyway, I need to understand how tools are working when making decisions and best practices to data collection and that’s why I want play around with Workspace too as much as possible. Boooooriiinggg, ok, sorry, lets move on to wonderful world of data storytelling in Analysis Workspace.

There hasn’t been big updates but very important small ones. I believe many updates has one common theme and that is “data storytelling”. Workspace itself is a great template to share analytics insights and make a story about the project through data. Now these kind of data storytelling features have gotten some nice updates and those will make sure you get to shine your stories in Workspace.

Rich Text Editor

There has been “text” visualization for a long time and you have been able to add text to your project. Why text? Shouldn’t we just report numbers? Surely, the main character is Mr. Number, but without a good story line it’s hard to understand Mr. Number. There are so many ways to interpret numbers and when product owner / marketing manager / CEO gets your report they might be overwhelmed about the data… is this metric populated every time or only once per visit? How are conversion percentages counted, by visits or visitos or ID numbers? With text you can add detailed descriptions about your dimensions and metrics. This way you make sure your report and data story is interpret correctly. You can even add disclaimers if you know that for some reason data isn’t valid for X period or whatever.

Anyway, before the text format had always been the same and it didn’t look very good or was bit hard to read and understand what was the most important explanation etc. Now, with the help of rich text editor we can shine and add some “effects” to our story line. You can even add links and that way you could point the exact location/page where this data is collected. Detailed video about this feature on Youtube: Rich Text Editor in Analysis Workspace

Next step could be to add color customatization and give options to make reports for your company’s own brand etc. There are already some discussions and here is one to follow https://forums.adobe.com/ideas/9592

Intra-linking

Talking about linking, how about intra-linking aka in-project linking. *Say LINKING one more time and I swear I’m going to…* Sorry, got your point, just can’t help myself, I used to be SEO consultant. 😉 This feature gives you an option to directly link to certain panel or visualization. For example, you could create tables of contents and make sure people are finding the data they are looking for. You can also do cross-project linking meaning you could add link to another Workspace project. This is great, because you shouldn’t do too long movie Workspace projects. Perfect, now you can skip some scenes and go directly to parts you want to see. And the Oscar goes to…. Mr. Number!

Detailed video about this feature on Youtube: Intra-linking in Analysis Workspace

Managing Visualization Data Sources

I have always loved Workspace and have learned it quite easily, but there was one exception that I struggled with some time, and that was managing data sources with different visualizations. After all, when I learned how it worked, it still felt bit (ok, way too) complicated. I’m sure Adobe has got some feedback about it and now it’s updated and works totally differently. To be honest, I haven’t play around with it much, but seems like the update is good based on the video. Now so much easier to understand and manageable. Now there are also detailed explanations about different settings. Looks great and see the video to learn more. Detailed video about this feature on Youtube: Managing Visualization Data Sources in Analysis Workspace

Series Label Editing

Small, but nice to have feature which you can use to edit labels on any visualization. Give your story a detailed meaning with labels everyone can understand.
Detailed video about this feature on Youtube: Series Label Editing in Analysis Workspace

Additional information

Did you know, nowadays, you can also rename metrics/dimensions on the fallout visualizations too and you can now disable truncation (of the names) on flow report. All good features to make your data stories better.

You should also check Eric’s video about data visualization with Analysis Workspace and you can learn what kind of visualizations you can add to your data story at the moment. I’m sure there will be new visualizations added in the future and hopefully static funnel (nowadays just fallout) is going to be one of those.

Brent Dykes had interesting talk about data storytelling on Adobe Summit few years ago. Check his old but still valid site/book about this topic.