Preset Feature Feedback
Probably the simpler and most-expected outcome from clicking on a dimension member. When the cross filter is initiated, a filtering event is sent to other charts listening into this filter. Not that in this case, there needs to be visual highlighting showing the active filter(s) in place. If the cross filtering event was triggered from a bar chart, the active bar needs to be clearly highlighted. Toggle-type interactions need to be made possible, and whether clicking on bars acts as radio buttons or checkboxes (multiple selection) need to be clear and consistent across charts implementing cross-filtering
Drill down is a simple interaction that implies one or many pre-defined hierarchies. Clicking on a “country”, say Canada for instance, would apply a filter on Canada, and drill into the defined hierarchy, say “Provinces”. Note that multiple hierarchies may exist, and that multiple levels may exist as well. Users may need to specify which hierarchy they want to follow, or skip levels.
How other charts on the dashboard should react when this is initiated? Unclear, which means probably no actions should be taken. Drilling operations should probably be limited to the chart where it’s initiated.
Also note that if drilling down is possible, drilling up makes just as much sense. If you allow users to go down you should enable them to go up and return to previous states. In this case it should mean “remove the filter on the parent and group by the parent dimension” which should bring you back to where you were following a drill-down operation.
Drilling across is similar to drilling down, except it does not expect hierarchical dimension. It says “filter on this and group-by some other dimension”. For instance you may want to filter on the country “Canada” and drill across to expose the different genders in Canada.
Note that drill-across is a superset of drill-down, meaning it can do EVERYTHING that drill-down can do, without requiring any hierarchy semantic upfront.
How other charts on the dashboard should react when this is initiated? Same to drilldown ^^^
Drill through should show you atomic events that related to the filter being applied. If you’re on an “invoices” dataset (with one row per invoice), clicking on Canada and selecting “drill through” should show a popup of individual invoices that compose the bar in the chart. Note that all active filters plus the one of the interaction should be applied, and a sample of rows should be shown.
Ideally, there are semantics that define clearly which subset of the columns should be surfaced in the context of a drill through operation. Meaning someone could define, for this dataset, which subset of columns should be shown when anyone is drilling through. In the absence of such semantics, surfacing all columns is probably the best bet.
