Spencer Butterfield

Looker Dashboards

Designing Looker Dashboards

Looker Dashboards are a primary destination where important business decisions are made. People can filter results, select chart data to cross-filter the page, explore individual tiles, set alerts, and schedule recurring reports.

Looker Customer Analysis dashboard cross-filtering across a map, acquisition donut, stacked bar chart, and retention lines

Sourced from Google

As a Product Designer at Looker, I helped design the dashboard experience across the viewing surface, edit mode, dashboard filters, cross-filters, alerts, and scheduled reports. My work connected authoring, exploration, and distribution so dashboards could support both active analysis and ongoing monitoring.

Designing for viewers and builders

Dashboards had to work in two modes. Viewers needed to understand the state of the data and interact without changing the shared view for everyone. Builders needed a clear way to add and arrange tiles, configure filters, edit underlying queries, and understand how each change would affect the dashboard. I helped shape the transition between those modes, keeping the viewing experience approachable while giving creators the control to build and maintain complex dashboards.

From shared view to action

  1. Build. Add queries, Looks, and text, then arrange tiles and connect filters to the right content.
  2. Explore. Change dashboard filters or select a data point to cross-filter related tiles.
  3. Monitor. Set an alert on a tile or schedule the dashboard to reach people on a recurring cadence.
Looker dashboard edit mode for Order Analysis, with add and filter controls, date and status filters, a Users by State map, and a Top Sales by Category donut chart
Sourced from Google

Designing interactions across the dashboard

Dashboard features could not be designed in isolation. A filter might control one tile or the full page, a cross-filter could reshape every related visualization from a single selection, and an alert or scheduled report needed to preserve the intended data context.

I helped develop shared patterns for filter controls, tile states, editing, alert setup, and scheduled delivery. Together, they turned dashboards into interactive tools people could build, explore, and rely on as the underlying data changed.