去年Anaplan UX的发布是Anaplan所看到的最大，最热切的产品更新之一。自从首次公开UX版本以来的几个月中，我们已经看到了数百个更新UX的更新，几乎每天都会提供额外的功能。这些新功能中的某些功能对于构建或使用应用程序的任何人都非常清楚，但是其他功能更隐藏。这是您可能或可能没有发现的五个UX功能。在仪表板中过滤页面选择器，我们总是能够将过滤器连接到页面选择器，如下屏幕截图所示。这将使我们能够动态限制用户可用的列表选择，而无需列表子集。最大的缺点是我们只能将此过滤器应用于视图上的页面选择器。从来没有一种方法可以过滤在仪表板上单独发布的页面选择器。UX具有将选择器过滤到整个页面的能力。现在，您可以过滤坐在页面功能区的上下文选择器。 This feature can be helpful in certain situations—for example: You want to restrict a user from selecting certain list items only on specific pages (and therefore selective access would not be suitable). You want to force a user selection, for example where they have made a line item selection and you want this to be reflected in their context selection. New Styles for Conditional Formatting Dashboards offered us the functionality to apply conditional formatting to a line item by filling the background of the cells using a choice of two, or three, ranges of color. It did the job of highlighting cells when needed (for things like variance analysis and input validations) but lacked a variety of styles and was limited in customization. The UX brings new styles and customizations that allow us to be a lot more creative when formatting cells within a grid or worksheet. Page builders can choose from a selection of three styles: The traditional background, which is what we are familiar with from dashboards. A new Border style, which shows a darkened edge of the cell and a lightened center containing the number. I like to use this style when displaying a summary line item. Another new Morse style, which shows a colored bar within the cell that changes color and size according to values. A handy feature for comparing data values and highlighting numerical variances. As well as these new styles, the UX also offers a much broader range of colors and color scales to choose from. Dashboards were limited to a handful of pre-defined color sets, offering various combinations of red, yellow, blue, green, and white. In UX, Page Builders can choose from a pallet of 36 colors and build their color scales by selecting a mixture of any of them. KPI Card Sparklines KPI cards are a brand-new feature to the UX which we didn't have with dashboards. They allow a Page Builder to publish a single value on a card, representing a key metric or KPI. While KPI cards have been around since the early days of the UX, the last few weeks has seen the introduction of sparklines on a KPI card. While the KPI card might display a full-year total as a value, the inclusion of a sparkline can be used to show a trend over time. The image below shows how we have used KPI cards with sparklines within an Insurance FP&A example. Users can also hover over the sparkline at various points to see the corresponding values. Split Screen Views in Worksheets The UX introduced two types of pages—boards and worksheets. While boards are great for presenting several individual elements (grids, charts, KPI cards, etc), worksheets are optimized for displaying a single large grid of data. Being able to easily navigate through a large grid of data is helpful, but very often, we want to review this data alongside another grid, perhaps with a synchronization between the two grids. In dashboards, we might try to align two views next to each other, but the result was often a lot of scrollbars and attempts at clever filtering to try and make the views work together. The UX delivers a clean and comfortable interface for working within a single large grid but also delivers functionality to include a secondary view at the bottom of the page which will automatically sync with your context selections. I’ve found this very useful for allowing the user to compare two grids, displaying a graph or a chart related to your primary grid, or even to give the user the ability to modify assumptions and see the immediate impact on results—for example, if you want to run some scenario analysis. Text Field Validations in Forms Finally, the last feature of the UX to be covered in this article is the ability to apply validations to fields when using a Form. Forms are an entirely new concept to the UX, providing Page Builders with the ability to add a pop-up view for creating new list items. Within a form, Page Builders can define which list properties or line items should be shown for the users to enter data. In dashboards, we would validate input cells using formula logic and some bright conditional formatting which would hopefully alert the user to an invalid input. Overall it worked well enough to prevent invalid data entering the model, but we could never force the validation at the point of data entry. The UX introduces several options for validation rules which can be set on any text formatted line item. The screenshot shows an example where Expense Name is selected as a field that is required. Anaplan will append a red asterisk to the end of the field name (to provide a visual indication that it is a mandatory field) and will not enable the Submit button until this field is completed. Given the range of validation rules currently on offer, the one I am likely to use the most often is Field is required. Being able to make a field mandatory, and preventing the user from submitting the form until the field has been populated, is something that is quite difficult to achieve with dashboards and more often requires the end user to notice an error message (which they may or may not choose to ignore!). These might not be the most talked-about features of the UX within the Anaplan community, but don’t underestimate the value that they can bring to your Apps! While we always look forward to the big product announcements, remember to also look out for those lesser publicized features which might offer something that can make a big difference to your user experience. Daniel Ellis is a Director at Mentat Technology and an Anaplan Solution Architect and Certified Master Anaplanner. Over the last 7 years, he has worked with a variety of customers in the UK and Europe to deliver Anaplan implementations in areas including Insurance, Asset Management, Finance, Supply Chain and Trade Promotion Management.
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