The mission of viewpoints is to provide users with role-specific enterprise architecture insights in the most suitable visualization format, to help them to make informed decisions faster.

Ardoq admins make the landing page familiar for a user by setting up a default viewpoint for a component type. With a clear viewpoint, the landing page is easy to understand.

Apart from serving the most relevant answers to Discover users, default viewpoint selection provides admins with better control of the data exposed to an Ardoq Discover user helping them define fields, connections and references a user should see when exploring a component type.

This can be managed by Ardoq admin using default viewpoints, which can be defined for each component type that exist in the organization.

By default, all components will be previewed in the Default Overview viewpoint. Although changing the default viewpoint is optional, it is highly recommended for Ardoq admins to do this in order to make the journeys of non-EA stakeholders in their organizations even easier, letting them explore component types in the most relevant visualizations.

Step #1. Navigate to the “Default viewpoint overview” page

When you want to change the default viewpoint for a component type, click on the Set default viewpoints section in the main menu.

On this page Ardoq admin can see the list of all component types in the organization and a default view as well as a workspace associated with each component type.

Please keep in mind that you must have viewpoints created before setting up the default viewpoints. Also, you’ll be able to change a default viewpoint anytime.

Step #2. Select a component type

Scroll down and use the page pagination feature or use a search bar to find a component type for which you want to change the default viewpoint.

Since one component type can be a part of a few workspaces, we added the Workspace column that can help you set up different viewpoints for the same component type depending on which workspace it is a part of.

Step #3. Set up a default viewpoint

The last step is to navigate to the third column and pick the viewpoint you want to assign to a component type from the dropdown menu. A drop down menu will show all viewpoints that have this specific component type included in it.

2. Modifying a default viewpoint will show you alerts.

Also, when you’re opening a viewpoint in the Viewpoint Editor, you’ll see a message on the top of the page with the list of components for which this viewpoint has been set as default. This will help you avoid errors when making any further changes to the viewpoint.

So if you’ll try to unpublish or add permissions to a viewpoint that is the default viewpoint for some component types, expect an error message to popup indicating that some changes cannot be done since it is a default viewpoint associated with X component.

Having a clear landing view for different component types engages users. So setting up a default viewpoint usually is the next step after an Ardoq admin has created a viewpoint. If you haven’t done this yet, check out our guide on building your first viewpoint.

Once a user lands on the viewpoint the admin set up for this component type, a user would want to continue their journey within this viewpoint.

For example. A user landed on the application details page and Product Hosting is the default viewpoint for this component. Next, they want to navigate between the components to get the product hosting-related information for the Latin America Business, a product that is supported by this application. All this journey will happen in the Product Hosting viewpoint in order to keep user in the same logical journey. When they want to start a new journey, they would search for this component using the search bar and explore it from a different perspective, where a new journey begins.

The logic behind this solution

Storytelling a user expects to see when they are exploring insights in the selected format. Let's say you are exploring the Wikipedia website and you found a term interesting to you. You can see that this term has a link so you're clicking on it and you're getting to another Wikipedia page rather than to the third-party website because you expect this information to be served to you in the same way.