Tulip Analytics Enhancements Rollout

[stefan]

Hello everyone,

I’m very excited to announce that we are rolling out some great enhancements to Tulip Analytics. This means that your charts will get fresh, professional looks, better layouts, and easier readability. This is already available for some customers and will be rolled out to all other customers soon - so stay tuned.

See below for some examples of what these changes look like.

Before / After Comparison

Additional Features

But that’s not all. With the new charting we are rolling out some additional features for Tulip Analytics:

• Custom rotation of xAxis labels to 0°, 45°or 90°, allowing you to prioritize the size of the visualization or the total number of visible labels.

xAxis Label Rotation

• Improved empty state and error state messages for analytics, for example for when there is currently no data available to be shown.

"No data" empty state in Analytics Editor (left) and Apps/Dashboards (right)

• The ability to add a “Trend Line” layer, which will help you understand trends in your data.

Trend Line Layer

• A “Calculated Limits” option for the Control Chart layer. This allows to calculate control chart limits with a click of a button based on existing data, making the control chart easily usable to anyone - independent of statistics knowledge.

Control Chart with Calculated Limits

Additionally, the new charting comes with a lot of “under the hood” changes that allow us to develop and roll out new Tulip Analytics features more quickly. Here are some upcoming examples as a teaser:

• Better formatting for charts (including custom axis titles and custom font sizes in Apps)
• More layers and layer options (including moving average and reference lines)

So be on the lookout for more changes in the coming months.

Behavior Changes

Finally, there are some small changes in behavior that come with the new charting as well that might apply to you if you are using very specific chart setups:

• Expressions that evaluate to a string (e.g. by adding a “%” sign) cannot be used for the yAxis anymore. As an alternative, the % sign can be added to the title. And we’ll soon add support for chart subtitles which will be the ideal place for this.

• All charts default to a 0° label rotation. If you see too few labels in your chart with that setting, you can change the label rotation to 45° or 90° in the formatting panel on the right side of the Analytics Editor.

• Grouped bar charts now reserve space for all groups for every xAxis value. This was not the case in the old charting due to a bug. In edge cases where the same field is selected for the xAxis and the “Group By” setting in a chart, this will make your chart look quite “sparse” in the new charting - although it still shows the exact same data. You can easily get back to the previous look by changing the “Display As” option to “Stack Column Bar”.

"Grouped Bar" vs. "Stack Column Bar" visualization

• As you can see on the first GIF, the new visualizations do not have the exact same spacing as the old ones. Should you have placed other widgets on top of an analysis widget in an App, you might have to slightly update their location to position them correctly again.

• Charts are limited to show a maximum of 50 series. Should any of your charts exceed that limit, are warning message will inform you that not all data is visualised.

Chart series limit

Should you run into any problems related to these or have any other questions, our support team is more than happy to help you. You can reach out to them at support@tulip.co any time.

Also, if you have any general comments or ideas related to Tulip Analytics, let us know in the Product Suggestions section!

Best,

Stefan
Product Manager | Analytics & ML

[da-noguchi]

Hello @stefan,

I noticed in this update that the line chart is displayed as a curve.
Is there any way to display this as a straight line?

[jas]

Hello @stefan, I noticed when you have a table analysis, you can’t customize the columns for Operations. They will always show the condition. Any way to fix that? It’s not great for Operators right now.

I would have expected the column to just display *REVIEW".

For other column types, it is possible to specify an alternative text. So to me this looks like an inconsistency. Not sure if this is new or an existing issue.

[thorsten.langner]

Hi @stefan

I have the same question as @da-noguchi.

Is there a way to decrease or remove the smoothing on line charts? Thats very annoying and missleading to have all line charts smoothed.

[stefan]

Thanks everyone for their feedback!

@da-noguchi @thorsten.langner Right now, this is not possible. The change from straight to curved was decided based on customer feedback during the prototyping and testing phase of these changes. I’m sorry to hear this does not work that well for you. Could you please send me a screenshot/s of one or a few examples where the new visualisations are challenging due to that to stefan[at]tulip.co so I can understand the impact for you better?

@jas It looks like you found a bug here for this special case. I’ll take a look at that with the team. For now, you can easily work around this by replacing your current configuration by an expression which achieves the same result. For the expression the field renaming works as expected.

Example:

For your specific case, the expression would need to be:
COUNT(Status = “CLOSED”)
Please note that “Status” is not just text but is added by selecting the “@

Status” item in the list below the expression editor. (Assuming your data is coming from a table. Otherwise select the respective App variable.)

Hope this helps!

Best,
Stefan

[Mahyar]

I have to second what @da-noguchi said. It can be misleading to have all charts displayed as curves. A trend based on let’s say discrete measurement points doesn’t necessarily follow a curved line.
Apart from that I have noticed that it’s not possible to display multiple parameter lines on a control chart. This is also an important missing feature.

[stefan]

@Mahyar Thanks for this feedback. I’d like to chat with you about the multiple parameter lines on a control chart. If you’d be up for that, please reach out to me at stefan[at]tulip.co.

Here is my initial take on this:
In a control chart, limits are typically calculated based on the statistical properties of past process data. This inherently only works for a single line per chart, as those limits will differ between parameters.

It is different for a chart which is not used for statistical process control but for specification limits. The latter would be charts with upper and/or lower specification and/or warning limits.

Some differences between the two:

Control Limits	Specification Limits
Calculated from past process data	Defined by customer
Based on actual process behavior	Based on desired process behavior
Typically reviewed for subgroups	Typically reviewed for individual items

We will be adding a reference line layer to Tulip Analytics in the coming months for showing a specification limit and highlighting points outside of it within Tulip.

[Mahyar]

@stefan you’re right about the control chart. Since the control lines are based on the historical values of a single parameter it wouldn’t make sense to have multiple parameters displayed. What I am looking for is exactly a way to display the specification limits in the chart. It’s great that it’s in the works, but it can’t come soon enough!

[stefan]

@da-noguchi @thorsten.langner @Mahyar I have discussed your feedback with the team and have good news for Release 249, which is the one after next that will reach you. See for yourself:

Special thanks to our developer @riebnik for making this happen in the code!

This is a great example of how valuable your feedback is to us for making sure we ship the best product possible. Changes to the product will not always happen this quickly, but we take every bit of feedback into account.

PS: The GIF also shows a sneak peek of the new formatting panel that will also ship in Release 249 - with more exciting new features for formatting charts.