Design reports to show details

3 levels of unconscious process

  • High-level metrics
  • Supporting visuals
  • Details, when required
    • Use drillable visuals
    • Add tooltips
    • Add drillthrough
      • less clutter than page/visual tooltips
    • Embed paginated reports
      • pbi have 150,000 row limit on pbi report
      • paginated report can export up to 1 million rows to excel

Design reports to highlight values

quickly communicate important and relevant facts using techniques like.

  • Conditional formatting

    • Background color (color blindness)
    • Font color (color blindness)
    • Data bars
    • Icons (recommended)
  • Overlaid analytics

    • trendline and forecasting
  • Anomaly detection

    • time series point highlight
  • Specialized visuals

    • key influencer
    • decomposition tree

Design reports that behave like apps

  • back
  • bookmark
  • drillthrough
  • page nav
    • can be bot hard coded page name or measure that returns page name
  • q&a
    • Unlike the Q&A visual, a button that is assigned the Q&A action doesn’t occupy significant space on the report page.
  • web url action url for information workers, i.e. send attachment to client with template message

Work with bookmarks

Bookmarks capture different state

  • data,
    • e.g. slicers. dro;; depth
  • display,
    • visibility of visuals
  • current page
    • can be used for page tooltip with preconfigured drillthrough selection.

By default, a new bookmark captures all state types, but you can decide to disable any of them.

Bookmark scope

all visual or selected visual

use cases

  • Reset slicers
    • capture data state but not anything else.
  • swap visuals
  • drill down multiple visuals to check the required depth (year quarter month)
  • pop up overlay
    • e.g. introduction and how to use the report

Design reports for navigation

  • ux component need to be considered early in design process.
  • retrofitting leads to unintuitive and disjoint experience and cost.
  • consistency and proximity of ui location is crucial.
  • on hover formatting can be used to show
    • highlight which option is active.
    • descriptive tooltip

Work with visual headers

  • drill up down, show data table.
  • always leave sufficient space for the head to appear in upper right (ensures consistency)
  • can to hidden using report setting
  • turn off header for those that dont require them will lessen distractions.
  • format visual > general > header icons
  • can also be configured in power bi service
    • setting for report > visual options > hide the visual header in reading view

Design reports with built-in assistance

aim for no training required experience. consider using

  • information page
  • visual header tooltip icon
    • this option enable a help icon in the header that allow you describe the visual (i.e. metric definition)
  • button with overlay

Tune report performance

  • use Performance analyzer
  • use dax studio to debug dax
  • visual with more than 100 fields will be slow to load, also confusing.

Optimize reports for mobile use.

Design a mobile report layout

Available in the view tab > mobile layout

Configure visuals and slicers for use in mobile reports

  • orientation and header may may need to change
  • responsive slicers must be horizontal.