The first thing you will see in the QuickSight app is a list of dashboards that you are authorized to see with their respective links to a detailed view for easy access. If you don't see this dashboard list, then click on the Dashboards icon from the menu at the bottom of your mobile device, as shown in the following screenshot:
Figure 6.2: Accessing dashboards
You will now see the list of dashboards associated with your user ID. In the next few sections, we will review how to navigate to other dashboard features.
From the dashboard listing, select USA Census Dashboard, which will then redirect you to the detailed dashboard view. In the detailed dashboard view, you will see all visuals that are part of that dashboard. You can click on the arrow to the extreme top right of each visual to open the specific chart in full screen mode, as shown in the following screenshot. In the scatter plot analysis shown here, you can further click on any of the dots to get specific values about that bubble.
The selected circle is for zip code 94027, which has a PopulationCount of 7,089 and MedianIncome of $216,905.00 and MeanIncome of 336,888:
Figure 6.3: Dashboard visual
One caution: while the detailed view allows you to focus on a bubble in the chart, it does not support zoom in like a standard image viewing application would behave.
The QuickSight mobile app also provides a search feature, which is particularly useful when you have several dashboards and only know a partial name. Here are the steps to search for a dashboard:
- First ensure you are in the Dashboards tab by clicking on the Dashboards icon from the bottom menu.
- Next, click on the search icon seen in the top-right corner.
- Next, type the partial name. In the following example, I have typed
Usa. - QuickSight now searches for all dashboards that have the word
Usain them and lists them out. - You can now click on the dashboard to get the details about that specific dashboard, as shown in the following screenshot:
Figure 6.4: Dashboard search
QuickSight provides a convenient way to access your favorite dashboards. To use this feature, first identify which dashboards you use often and click on the star icon to its right-hand side, as shown in the following screenshot. Next, to access all of your favorites, click on the Favorites tab and the list is then refined to only those dashboards that you had previously identified as favorites:
Figure 6.5: Dashboard favorites
While dashboards are fairly easy to interact with on the mobile app, there are key limitations when compared to the standard browser version, which I am listing as follows:
- The app currently supports only Apple devices
- You cannot create or share dashboards to others using the mobile app
- You cannot zoom in/out from the visual, which would be really good in scenarios where the charts are dense
- Chart legends are not shown
- The search feature is very basic and only supports names
Most of these features are being addressed in the next releases of the product.