Self-Service Exploration
Self-Service Exploration
Here is a scene every dashboard designer knows. You ship a dashboard. Within a week you get an email: "This is great — could you add a version broken down by product instead of region?" You add it. Next week: "...and one by owner?"
Explore is the feature that ends that queue.
What Explore does
Every widget's action menu includes Explore. Choosing it takes the widget's query — with the dashboard's current filters and selections applied — and opens it in a lens: the full exploration interface, with the grouping, measure, and chart-type controls exposed.
From there, the user is no longer looking at a picture someone else designed. They're holding the query.
- 1
Open Explore on the widget
The widget's current query and the dashboard's active filters come along with it, so the starting point is exactly what they were looking at.
- 2
Change the question
Swap the grouping from region to product, add a second grouping, switch the measure, change the chart type — all point-and-click in the lens.
- 3
Read the answer
The question they emailed you about is now answered, by them, in about thirty seconds.
- 4
Save it as their own lens
If it's a cut they'll want again, they save it as a lens in their own app. It becomes theirs to keep, without touching your dashboard.
That last step is the quiet win. The dashboard stays focused on the story you designed; the one-off variations live as personal lenses belonging to the people who need them. Your dashboard doesn't slowly bloat into forty charts because forty people each asked for one.
When you should turn it off
Explore isn't always the right call. Reasonable reasons to disable it:
Curated executive dashboards
A board-level dashboard where every number is deliberately framed. Letting a viewer regroup it invites misinterpretation of metrics that only mean what they mean in context.
Embedded and mobile surfaces
A dashboard embedded on a Lightning record page or built tight for mobile — dropping a user into a full lens interface there is jarring and often broken visually.
Note the trade-off is genuinely a trade-off. Turning Explore off protects the narrative, but it also puts you back on the receiving end of those emails. Default to leaving it on unless you have a reason.
How to turn it off
Both switches are widget properties, set in the dashboard editor with the widget selected:
Show widget actions
The master switch. Uncheck it and the widget's whole action menu disappears — no Explore, no Share, no Set Notification, no Annotate.
Show explore actions
The targeted switch. Leaves the action menu in place but removes the exploration options, so users keep sharing and downloading without being able to regroup the query.
Reach for show explore actions first. Switching off widget actions entirely is a blunt instrument — it takes away notifications, annotations, and downloads at the same time, and users rarely connect the missing menu to a deliberate design decision. They just assume the dashboard is broken.
Explore lets a user build their own cut of the data. The next lesson covers how they keep and share a cut of your dashboard, without leaving it at all: views.
Discussion
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