About Watchlists
In this short post, I am discussing a very nice usability feature in Oracle Analytics called the Watchlist.
Users at their everyday's work frequently use a specific and limited number of reports or analyses. Oracle Analytics lets users to mark these reports or analyses as favorites, which means these analyses will be displayed in the Favorite Workbooks section of Oracle Analytics Home Page, hence enabling users with fast and easy access to their favorite analyses.
Another way of presenting frequently used content, available in the latest release of Oracle Analytics, is the Watchlists. This idea has already been introduced in Day by Day mobile application, and same functionality is available in Oracle Analytics Mobile app.
The idea is to give users ability to run analyses and review results of selected visualizations, like visualization cards, in user's home page without actually opening any of them. Users are not require to review analyses if they don't need any more details, hence they are more productive.
For example, using Watchlists can be particularly useful if there are a lot of workbooks stored in the catalog and users would spend a lot of time just by searching and locating their analyses in the catalog.
When users customise their home pages, they can see that the Watchlists is one of the sections of the home page, and there is also an option to enable Featured Watchlists in the top of the home page.
So what is needed to create Watchlists?
In order to add a visualization to the Watchlist, open a workbook. If you hover over specific visualization, as always, there are some icons displayed at the top right corner. There is a new action, Add to Watchlist, added.
Simply click on Add to Watchlist icon and add visualization to the new watchlist.
A new Add to a New Watchlist dialog box opens and a bit more details can be provided.
Other visualizations can be added to an existing watchlist now or new watchlists can be created.
In case there are more than one vizulization added to a watchlist, then one can always be defined as a first card of that watchlist.
Homepage will now display favorite watchlist at the top of the page.
If there are more than one watchlist created, these can be selected from a menu that is available next to the selected watchlist name.
Otherwise, all watchlists are listed in the home page. If Watchlist is selected in the search field, the list of existing watchlist is displayed.
Let's not forget, watchlist cards are live - using live data and live queries:
Further navigation through watchlists take user to details of selected watchlist. From this point, selected watchlist can be opened in a workbook:
Conclusion
Watchlists is really very nice feature that helps users to focus on what really matters. Important information is available literally at finger tips and if users want to drill into more details, these are available just a click or two away. From end-user perspective this is quite useful feature. I am convinced many users will use it quite often.