How many times did you drill down in one of your dashboards and lost the context so you can’t really decide anymore if the information you see is actually good or bad? Without direct comparison next to each other, it is very hard to make a decision. Einstein Analytics has a powerful setting to enable the user to do exactly this. With the Trellis mode, you can show the same chart for the dimension elements you want to compare in mini charts or small multiples. 

Those mini charts have amazing benefits and were popularized by Edward Tufte. The brain is trained to look for patterns, Trellis create those patterns and are almost effortless to spot. Therefore the cognitive load is reduced and the brain can digest more data points much faster. Additionally, you can bring more data points on the screen as it is already easier for the brain. As a side effect, you might be able to reduce drill down functionality as you already show more granular data. In addition, you can use the Page functionality, so you can give the user a smooth way to switch between the total summary and the next level with Trellis.

Summary

• Low cognitive effort as they eye looks for patterns
• Easy to compare with synchronized axes
• High information density 

Setup Trellis 

The default setting won’t make your trellis look amazing nor easy to read. Especially the axis labels take too much space of your charts, so they actually are not readable anymore. Get rid of those axis titles as they are repetitive information which is useless for the Trellis. The point is to enable the eye to detect patterns in the data and to compare the different trellis with the least effort. That means you can choose the widget size in your dashboard as small as you can still see the pattern correctly, EA is auto-sizing the charts accordingly. The goal is here to increase the information density so the user has to interact less with filters etc. which would take time and increases the information load for the user. 

 

• Get rid of unnecessary axis information/labels
• Choose the Wrap mode, uses a lot of whitespaces and avoids unnecessary borders
• Flip labels to reduce eye movement
• Choose how many charts you want to have per row
• Plan room in the widget size for additional elements in the future

Limits of Trellis

The more trellis you can fit on the screen the better, but be careful if the dimension you are choosing has too many elements. If not all Trellis are visible on one page you are loosing its’s benefits and you have to scroll.  Therefore, other approaches might be a better fit. 

 

 

 

Use case example: 

Sometimes line charts can get really busy. Already with more than 3 or 4 lines, it is already very hard to understand what’s going on. Trellis help here as well and give a clear picture of what is going on.

 

You can go further and enrich your Trellis chart with averages which I described in this post.