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the next thing that we think about what building models is that we have to understand that the mall itself drives all the functionality of the entire looker it's sort of the core and we have to design it in reference to all the people who are using it so we have to make sure our analysts are explorers our consumers understand what they're looking at I don't know if anyone does this but none of us should ever just generate a model and keep all the columns names the same if those column names suck we want to make them pretty so the the model is the skeleton of the looker it drives all our API requests all of our saved queries all of our reports all of our scheduled tasks everything so anytime you make a change you want to make sure that you're careful with the model the view and the fields and explorers those are the core objects that lives in the model that drives all of those other functionalities so skeletons evolve over time some people believe some people might find this controversial so over time our business is gonna get better at collecting data we're gonna get better at understanding our business model and hopefully we'll become better at making money and operate as a business so our skeletons will change however not all change is good so here's some x-rays of dislocated skeletons and you can see like just like I think like the one with the elbow is like less than an inch of movement but the muscle can't work anymore there's blood vessels they're being constricted it really really hurts cuz like all the nerves are like pressurized and they're firing all the time and this happens in looker too so this error is number one error we receive in our chat support which is a unknown or inaccessible field referenced whenever I pop on chat I I have in my bookmarks the link to how to solve for this error so I can really quickly give it to someone but it really happens it happens because usually we really 'salve you or redefine a field and we forget oh we have explores they're using that field or we have other views that are using that field and this can cause some pretty big problems there's some triage for this there's a not so well-known feature called the alias parameter and so if you rename a field you can alias that feel to another namespace and then all your URLs and everything in looker will try like search through that whole array of the namespace to make sure that still works this this triaging doesn't actually work for the model or the explorers or the views so when you try to rename those objects you get 404 and this can break a lot of things aside we solve for this now that we know that the model is the skeleton of our looker it's really important to plan out your model before you start running away and building with it you want to look at all of your different tables that are available in the connection you want to make sure that from those tables you know what the use cases are from now and going forward and that will give you an idea of what explorers you'll need what views you'll need what kind of PD tees or derive tables you need it's sort of a road map to what your models future is in comparison to today and that will save you a lot of pain seventy of you have seen a movie lost in translation anyone yeah I did not I have not seen it I did Wikipedia yesterday though and one of the kind of recurring themes in the movie is getting lost in translation shocker right sorry sorry for those of you that haven't seen it and one of the things wouldn't mentioned earlier today is that look and those meant to be a language and it's actually meant to be a language that helps you express your data to your end-users providing that translation layer and working on the customer success team one of the things that we hear a lot from our customers is how do I get my business users involved how do I get them excited how do I engage them how do I create an engaging look redeployment and it really starts with that translation layer it starts with taking the data taking the building blocks taking those bones and starting to put in appearance on the front end we're gonna use we're gonna kind of further this analogy but it's like plastic surgery right you want to put a face to it that they recognize that they like that they enjoy that they want to come into and play with and it's familiar to them and when we when I first started that looker we didn't necessarily have all these parameters that helped you curate that experience for your end-users but we started to add them as we saw people kind of struggle with that that appearance and give you guys the ability to create something more friendly so again as Mike mentioned there's no need to change those field names use your aliases but if you want to start to curate that that front end a little bit we have parameters like labels again that set translation so taking something like you know inventory item ID and turning it into something like inventory info or something like that additionally which I'll go into detail on we have view labels this allows you to curate and kind of create contextual groupings of your fields that way users kind of understand how they relate to the business and give you more context there and then finally we have descriptions so each field can have a description parameter added to it where you can put an entire string of text giving them when they hover over that field and the explore a little bit of information on how to use it what it means to the business that's a really really great way for them to get a little bit more familiar with your building blocks your KPIs and your metrics right yeah and I think the driving for why people don't do this usually the driving causes you know they're using the they're renaming the wrong things essentially they're renaming those model objects that Mike was talking about for the sake of you know changing how it looks on the front end which creates kind of like an awkward situation and so I think that's kind of like the underlying concept here is I developed that that model and the model objects should be friendly to the developers and should be recognizable to the developers and then the labels are really good ways to actually abstract what the underlying database looks like you know for the front end user and make it more business friendly exactly so what does this look like in practice so kind of furthering koala's example imagine that users view with the other users tables normalized so we have a user's profile user fact user address to a developer this is important right you need to know these tables you need to know how they relate you need to join them together to your end users users or just users I don't really know what the profile has to do with the address has to do with their facts and any other derive tables or any other derived columns they create for them so for them why not create a view label group them all into users something that's familiar for them and groups them as such so that's one example there that's applied again at the join level so when you're joining views in together you can group them as such another way to accomplish this is with individual fields and so the same way when you're working with dimension groups in looker for time frames we have week month year day of week quarter was added a bunch of releases ago you can do the same concept you can start to group your fields into logical groupings that make sense so if you have a bunch of fields that relate to a user's address group them as such allow them to kind of collapse or expand that when they need to access those fields and again that's a little bit more recognizable to them and so we can do a little kind of in in the you know plastic surgery at the before-and-after images so this is what that would explore looked like beforehand and say again everything's kind of grouped into their different views but once we apply those labels we now see that everything kind of collapses under users they can expand or collapse that or and also go into the addresses as well and then expand that into each of the fields that relate to the address for the user so in that experience there for them to kind of get familiar with the fields that are recognizable for them it's just it's a much better place to start okay and this is especially important when I'm bringing my users you know that users explore into other explorers that might already have four or five different views built into them because then the number of views you're starting to see there on the left and the groupings again back to the idea of like having that cognitive load you're just seeing so many different versions of it you don't know exactly where to turn your eye right so the other example of this is if you're working with event data if you have a really really wide table with many many fields each of those fields could relate to something about that event the ID the browser where that event was fired the city of the country where that person or that device was from information about the latitude and longitude or even the device itself like it's operating system in this example what we'd want to do is instead put the view labels onto the fields themselves but again create that grouping so on the front end to the end-user they now have a way to look at all the event data all of the location data for that event all of the device data for that event and so we'll see that before and after again here a lot of you probably have experienced it's kind of the infinites role effective looker where there's just so many so many fields right this is an attempt to kind of solve for that and again kind of collapse things into something that's more recognizable to the user the device the events the location telling you something about those events again making a little bit more familiar to them a little bit easier to navigate all this is kind of again in line with creating a translation layer creating an experience for the users to come in to see things that are familiar see the naming the the the context and the descriptions of fields and things that they're used to that they talk about and so when you're working with them hearing the way they describe fields hearing the way that they work with their with their data is important because you're using that to kind of again create that translation they had to add this slide when we were working on this presentation I couldn't help but think you know between the building blocks and the bones and the surgery I could help but think of Frankenstein and you know if you know the story of Frankenstein you can you can create a lot in looker right and we don't want people necessarily creating really scary awful beasts like Frankenstein we want you guys to create a really great experience something that is friendly familiar and awesome and so if you heed these advices hopefully you won't have a data Frankenstein on your hand