Data Connection Exploration

Concept wireframes for a product revision — selected screens from a significantly longer document

Several of Actuate's products required that users connect to an external source of data. But the process was designed with large databases in mind and didn't work well for simpler applications — like connecting to an Excel spreadsheet.

We wanted to see if we could streamline that process and make it more intuitive.

I built the new flow around a robust and highly visual preview screen. The old process didn't show you what your data would look like when you imported it and made it difficult to reformat or delete columns of data.

To speed up the process, the preview was designed to work with just the first ten rows of data — once the user got things how she'd like, then the software would import the full data set (which could take several minutes when spreadsheets with thousands of rows were involved).