---
title: "Designing Looker Explore"
description: "Looker Explore is a self-service workspace for querying governed data. People select dimensions and measures, apply filters, run the query, and turn the result into a visualization."
---

# Designing Looker Explore

Looker Explore is a self-service workspace for querying governed data. People select dimensions and measures, apply filters, run the query, and turn the result into a visualization.

As a Product Designer at Looker, I contributed to the core Explore experience across the field picker, filters, visualization library, saved Looks, Quick Start analyses, maps and heat maps, and accessibility. My work focused on making a powerful analytical workflow easier to enter, understand, and reuse.

## Making exploration easier to start

Explores can have thousands of fields, and oftentimes it can be hard to figure out where to start. I helped design the field picker to make the data model and active query easier to scan, search, and manage. I designed Quick Start analyses as a guided entry point: people could begin with a modeled question, see its fields, filters, results, and visualization together, then adapt it to their own analysis.

## From question to saved analysis

1. **Build.** Select dimensions and measures, then apply filters to shape the query.
2. **Visualize.** Choose and configure a chart, including maps and heat maps for geographic patterns.
3. **Reuse.** Save the query and visualization as a Look, add it to a dashboard, or continue exploring from the result.

## Charting and Accessibility

I helped evolve the visualization library with common controls for series, axes, colors, labels, legends, and tooltips. I also designed maps and heat maps, which required specialized interactions for geographic data.

I made the Explore experience [VPAT](https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance/vpat) accessible, aligning the product with Section 508 and WCAG requirements. Together, the improvements made the path from governed model to answer more approachable without removing the flexibility experienced analysts relied on.