Customised User Homepages

How to set up customised Markdown homepages For different groups of users

In bigger organisations, you might want more control over what your users see when they land in Looker, and for this, the ability to write documents using Github Flavored Markdown/HTML is really useful. You can also use Boards, or even dashboards as landing pages by using Markdown/HTML in text tiles.

You can even add navigation menus in Markdown docs - details in the Looker docs here.

If you’re using SAML/Google auth then you’ll have set a default role for new users, which probably has minimal or no access granted. In this case it’s good to have a landing page that explains to users how to request access. By using groups and user attributes you can specify a landing page for these no-access-yet users, and override it with a different landing page once they have some access granted.

To do this you need to configure the landing_page user attribute to the (relative) URL of the document, and then specify a different URL/document for users who do have access.

There are some gotchas to be aware of here.

First, if your default role has no permissions at all, users won’t even be able to view Markdown documents! To do this they must have the access_data permission. So long as the role has no other permissions, users still won’t be able to view Looks, dashboards, Explores, or anything else. You might want to make an empty project/model just to contain the default landing page to be extra sure users won’t get access they shouldn’t have.

Second, your no-access landing page attribute must be set by a group (probably the All Users default group). Leave the default value for the attribute as /browse. Otherwise, the default landing page will be linked from ‘Overview’ or ‘Home’, which can be confusing for users who do have access.

You’ll also need to have a group or groups which assign your roles which do have access, so that the group can also set the landing page attribute. It’s a good idea to use groups as much as possible since you can manage various configuration options together via a group. Remember that group values for user attributes are applied in the order that they’re listed, so the one for users with access should be above the no-access one.

Lastly, be mindful of writing too much in your landing pages, and make use of emojis or pictures so it’s clear when users have access or not. All of us can be guilty of scanning and not reading things properly at times, especially if people are busy and not necessarily familiar with Looker. Answering user queries can be a big time drain, so make it easy on yourself and your users!

You could also go as far as having multiple landing pages for different many different groups of users.