Enhancing Accessibility: Mobile Layout for Amazon Quick Free Form Dashboards
In today’s fast-paced business environment, decision-makers need quick and seamless access to data, whether they’re in a meeting, between tasks, or on the go. However, many teams still face the challenge of using dashboards designed for desktop screens on mobile devices, leading to inefficient pinch-and-zoom interactions. This often results in unnecessary effort just to check important metrics like revenue, pipeline data, or operational statuses while traveling.
Amazon Quick addresses this issue effectively through the introduction of Mobile Layout for Free Form Dashboards. This innovative feature transforms dashboards into a single-column, touch-optimized view that automatically fills the device screen. This ensures that users can access their data instantly without resizing or horizontal scrolling. Available in every supported AWS Region, this transformation optimizes the desktop canvas for a continuous scrolling experience on mobile devices, keeping visuals interactive and properly sized.
One of the most convenient aspects of Mobile Layout is that dashboard authors don’t need to make any changes for it to take effect. This seamless transition means that readers can immediately benefit from improved data accessibility on any phone or tablet. In this article, we delve into the mechanics of Mobile Layout and provide tips on optimizing your dashboards for the best mobile experience.
Mobile Layout Explained
Mobile Layout is a specialized rendering mode for Free Form dashboards. When a dashboard is accessed on a device with a small viewport, Amazon Quick automatically detects the screen size and switches to the mobile view. This provides users with a single-column, vertically scrolling stream of visuals. The visuals are resized to fill the screen width, ensuring an optimal viewing experience.
The activation of Mobile Layout is based on the device’s viewport dimensions. If the viewport fits the size of a phone or tablet, the mobile layout is enabled. For larger screens, the standard desktop rendering remains in use.
Capabilities
Mobile Layout offers several features to enhance the usability of Free Form dashboards:
Continuous scrolling. Visuals are arranged in a single column, with each visual filling the entire window width. The aspect ratios are preserved, ensuring that portrait and landscape visuals maintain their intended dimensions.
Made sensitive to groups. Free-form dashboards often use overlapping visuals, such as KPI values overlaid on a background. Mobile Layout maintains these group boundaries, displaying grouped visuals as a single unit while preserving the layered design.
Player controls. Users can switch between Mobile and Desktop views using a built-in view switcher in the Quick mobile app. On mobile browsers, portrait orientation provides the mobile experience, while landscape orientation offers the desktop view.
Performance. The Mobile Layout employs an optimized rendering path that reduces resource consumption on mobile devices. Dashboards that previously struggled to display smoothly on phones now load quickly and scroll effortlessly.
Actions Required
For dashboard readers: No action is required. Mobile Layout is automatically enabled for existing Free Form dashboards. Simply open a dashboard on a phone or tablet to immediately access the mobile view.
For authors and administrators: No changes are necessary. Authors of free-form dashboards benefit automatically, as their published dashboards will display in mobile layout on smaller screens. Authors using tiled or classic layouts are unaffected, as these layout types retain their existing responsive behavior. Administrators also need not configure anything, as the mobile layout is active by default for Free Form dashboards across the account.
Getting the Best Mobile Experience with Groups
Authors who use overlapping visuals can take an optional step to ensure their design translates well to mobile by organizing these visuals into groups. In Free Form layout, authors commonly layer visuals on top of each other, such as placing KPI values on a colored background. While these overlapping items appear as intended on desktops, the mobile layout engine must determine how to handle them.
Without grouping, each visual becomes its own entity in the mobile scroll, potentially causing elements like a KPI on a background image to appear as separate cards. While visuals still display correctly, they may lose their intended layered relationship. By grouping visuals, the background and KPIs remain together, preserving the author’s intended design.
For documentation on using visual groups in a free-form layout, see Customizing Visuals in a Free-Form Layout.
How to Group Overlapping Visuals
To group visuals, follow these steps:
- Open your analysis in Amazon Quick design view.
- Hold Shift and select each visual that should stay together (for example, a background rectangle and the KPI visuals above it).
- Open the context menu and choose Band.
There is no limit to the number of groups per sheet. Each group is treated as a single visual unit on mobile.
How Visuals Are Sized on Mobile
When Mobile Layout renders visuals in continuous scrolling, it follows these guidelines:
- Each visual fills the entire width of the window.
- Proportions are preserved. A tall bar chart remains tall, and a wide line graph stays proportionately short.
- A minimum height of 272 pixels ensures that chart elements like legends and axis labels remain visible.
- A maximum height limit prevents visuals from extending beyond the viewport.
- Tables with many columns are displayed at full width with horizontal scrolling enabled.
If a visual becomes too short to render its internal elements, an information icon appears. Users can switch to desktop mode or rotate to landscape mode to view the entire visual.
Getting Started
Mobile Layout eliminates the need to pinch and zoom on dashboards designed for desktop screens. It is available today on Amazon Quick. To try it out, follow these steps:
- Open a Free Form dashboard on your phone or tablet using the Quick mobile app.
- Scroll through your visuals in the continuous scroll view.
- Use the view switcher to switch between Mobile, Desktop, and Landscape modes.
- If your visuals overlap, open your analysis, select them, open the context menu, and choose Band.
For more information, see the following resources: Here
About the Authors
Rushabh Vora
Rushabh is a Senior Product Manager for Amazon Quick at Amazon Web Services, where he leads the generative AI capabilities for data analysis and visualization. Rushabh strives to enable organizations to transform raw data sets into actionable insights through natural language, reducing the time it takes from data to decision from hours to minutes. He is passionate about making data mining and dashboarding accessible to all business users, regardless of technical expertise.
Christopher Lott
Christopher is a Principal Solutions Architect for Amazon Quick. He has 25 years of experience in enterprise software development. Chris lives in Sacramento, CA and enjoys gardening, cooking, aerospace/general aviation, and traveling the world.
Nachiketha Sagri Hayavadana Upadhya
Nachiketha is a Senior Front-End Engineer for Amazon QuickSight. With over 6 years of experience on the QuickSight team, Nachiketha specializes in building thematic capabilities and creative constructs that enable clients to create visually rich, brand-consistent analytical experiences.
Sai Dinesh Garapati
Sai Dinesh Garapati is a Front-End Engineer for Amazon QuickSight, where he works on dashboards and analytics creation experience. It creates interactive features that help authors create and customize dashboards more efficiently.
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