Making SAS VA reports more more user-friendly with contextual info and data definitions in tooltips

[JeremyAT]

Hi All,

I'm an experienced Tableau developer now working with SAS VA and I want to incorporate contextual info, data definitions, and other guidance info into tooltips to aid report users interpret visualizations. This is relatively easy to do in Tableau, but it seems that in SAS VA that only a single string of text can be added to an image or icon (i.e. Tooltip text). What I really want is to incorporate hover tooltips such as shown below (from: https://community.tableau.com/s/question/0D54T00000C5bhaSAB/qt-help-button-tool-tip). Is there a way to overcome this tooltip limitation in SAS VA? On a similar note, are there any SAS provided guidelines on improving UX of SAS reports? Many thanks in advance.

Tableau Tooltip

[FalkoSchulz · Accepted solution]

Hi Jeremy,

For any more complex help content or rich text - I would probably use a popup dialog window. To achieve that - the high level steps are:

1. Add a new page
2. Change the page type to popup (use the overflow menu on the page to change the type)
3. Add any content you like e.g. a Text object and enter related help text. You can also mix in some additional content e.g. Images etc.
4. Go to your original image object used for the help button and add a page navigation to the new popup-page.
5. Enter view mode and click on the button

While it doesn't show on hover - the popup dialogs are a great tool to allow some more app like behavior and additional content to be shown. 

In regards to your report design question. SAS provides some high level UX recommendations around styling etc. at https://communities.sas.com/html/assets/breports/index.html . In addition - you may also want to check out the VA gallery at https://communities.sas.com/t5/SAS-Visual-Analytics-Gallery/tkb-p/vagallery with tons of report examples to get inspired.

Hope this helps! Falko 

[JeremyAT]

Thank you FalkoSchulz. I very much appreciate your help with this.