Hello:
we find ourselves wanting to use the "wildcard search" filter in Tableau and are experiencing some frustrations with getting it to behave the way that we think will work best for our users.
To summarize, the wildcard search option is an integrated "wildcard search + list" and works well for us, because our filters can run to thousands of items. Here's an example of it in use for us.
2015-11-18_09-19-35.png - davehk's library
The "thousands of items" thing is important because it's not unusual for a user to want to view the world of Amazaon and Walmart, and when the filter list is thousands of items long, you're not going to quickly know which merchants were chosen.
However, there are two problems that we have with this implementation:
1) The user doesn't know how to start. When you present this filter to people there is nothing to indicate how a person can interact with it: 2015-11-18_09-23-15.png - davehk's library.
By contrast, when you use the standard "multi-select list", the user has at least a fighting chance of figuring out that she can click on the down-triangle to see things:
2015-11-18_09-25-16.png - davehk's library
2) there's no Apply button, which is sad - in the dropdown version of the same filter, we see the Apply, which is great when filter changes cause long-running computes to happen:
2015-11-18_09-32-42.png - davehk's library
Have other people found themselves grappling with this? And if so, what did you do or try?
The short answer is yes, we have grappled with this. And the compromise I settle for most of the time is a multi drop down. Because the user can type in string to limit/find what they are looking for. And they still have the option to use the scroll bar to find it if they don't remember the first word or term.
I never use wild cards, because as you said the user needs to know/remember what term to type. I think if the multi drop down filter were a wild card search instead of a first letters/term search, we would have the best of both worlds.
Cheers,
--Shawn
