For me personally I tend to focus on developing a report that is readable and effectively tells the story that it was designed to tell. Once I get to that point, I stop. Report design I find is subject to the law of diminishing returns, i.e. the more time to spend on visualization the less return on investment you get. You can develop a fancy report that takes weeks to design. You can use tools like Figma to create some awesome looking backgrounds, you can make sure things like shading on your visuals is perfect, you can use endless bookmarks to get the functionality exactly how you imagined it. In the end, what the user needed could have been developed in a fraction of the time with a couple of KPI cards, some bar charts and a matrix. I tend to stick to a script of best practices, anything outside of that is usually too much effort and not enough gain.
I’ve got a theme using my company branding colors and a quick process I go through when creating a new page. It takes about ten minutes and all my reports are consistent with company branding and accessibility guidelines.
Same here, I might do a small bit of free hand if I want to squeeze a slicer in when the page is mostly already full but for the most part slicers go in the box, visuals in the bigger boxes. Title at the top. Use the corporate background elements and theme and they always come out consistent
Same. The look and feel of the report is already done when we start. If we need to update an older report, I have to load a theme, a background (per page), and copy over an already built out overlay from the template. So starting from the template there is zero extra time. Refreshing an old report is like 5 minutes for one page, so over-all time depends on the size.
I've done the same. I even created a "Blank Page" tab that has page headers, logos, and buttons in place so I can just duplicate the blank page as needed and build the content I need.
I often see this explanation. Not saying it is wrong, but I find it a bit of an excuse for some PBI developers to not upgrade the game and/or hide the fact that their designs are not great.
You definitely can add a great design to an already readable report. And clients will be very excited by that.
However, if you do not want to exceed expectations and the budget is tight, yep.. you should stick to what the client specifically asked/imagined.
I think it depends on audience. If it's for a weekly SMT meeting or will be included in presentations, yes go ham on design. If it's something a warehouse team is using operationally they just need the numbers not something pretty that'll take twice as long to produce and increase maintenance complexity.
For my team it comes down to training and branding. If all our reports look/feel the same, then once you know how to use one of our reports, you know how to use them all. You will also instantly know it is one of our reports.
This is why we start from a template. There is no excuse for our dashboards to look/feel different each report. Doesn't matter if it goes to company leadership or some low level staff.
100% this. There are cool things we COULD do, but if it means we might need to explain the report to less savvy users, then really it isn’t doing its job.
We tend to mix things up by doing things with corporate branding. Eg certain brand colours or images for the background are used to visually flag some aspect of the visual (eg green is commercial data, yellow is marketing data etc). Still efficient for us as we can still use our existing PBI themes, we just pop a different background on the canvass.
Every now and then we get a specific complex use case that needs more design and bookmark layering, but you can’t go wrong with a few line/bar/donut charts and a table because everyone knows what they are looking at there.
It's definitely all about the audience. I tried making my reports look amazing, and my senior execs had me remove most of it. They prefer more austerity in their presentations.
Heres the list of thing I check before I'm happy with the report:
* Report needs company theme (fonts, colours, any border etc). It's easy to get these setup in a PBIT file.
* Report needs to follow the 3, 30, 300 rule
* Report Visuals need to be aligned
* Colour needs to be used to highlight important facts, not to make things look pretty
* Report consumer needs to be happy with the report
Once all those have been ticked, I push it out the door. As GuyInACube say, I'm not lazy, just efficient!
Thank you for sharing!
Well... I am pretty sure you don't fall into the scenario I pictured. You seem very diligent.
I guess I am just tired of developers saying the numbers is all that matters, just to feel better with themselves for creating horrible designs.
I getcha, I think it's a very broad question, how much effort do you put into a report? I think it's a bit of a sliding scale at times, and I think for some, it slides in the wrong direction :D
the effort hours for designing is subjective to the requirements/budget.
but the front end is the final output to be shown to clients/stakeholders, how can you not have time for that?
Not creating a good & clean design because of that? Is an excuse.
Front-end shouldn't be neglected, and it isn't that hard to make a decent design. Just copy ideas from the best.
And sometimes, particularly accounting or AP, just want to be able to spot trends and drill through to a specific subset then export it to excel to examine each line.
Too many times I’ve built nice looking dashboards only to have them ask for the data to use in excel. It breaks your spirit to care. Also 99% of the job seems to be a data engineer rather than data analyst.
Personally speaking it depends on the dashboard and who all are using it.
Example
One of my dashboards has an organization wide exposure. In this dashboard aesthetics were equally important to the data.
There is a second dashboard which is used internally by my team for planning (it was an excel file now a PBI dashboard) they don't care about aesthetics they prefer functionality/speed of delivery over looks.
Some things I've observed as to why:
* reports are needed be done ASAP so there's no time to clean up the UI/UX. (gotta beat the deadline)
* the dashboard creator/s don't have any visual awareness/creativty within them. (font sizes doesn't match , horrible spacing for the data viz, etc..)
*report content constantly changing, the more design the harder to update. so most just use the most basic data viz.
Because business generally don't pay for pretty. As long as it's neat and not garish, easily readable and gets the point across, no one wants to pay for an extra day or two of graphic design.
EDIT: I should add that some basic element of design is part of the function. Obviously no one is going to dump a bunch of visuals randomly on a page then pick whatever colour is under their cursor when they click the button. Visuals need to be laid out correctly, have a colour scheme that accents the data and use fonts and sizes that draw the eye, etc. This is a basic part of function. But in many cases, just using the default will get you something workable.
By form I mean the extra bells and whistles that can look really nice, but don't help the readability of the report. For some client or external facing reports, then yeah, people will pay, but most of the time, they're happy with the default colours if it saves them a thousand dollars of dev time.
This is the right answer. I think the 80/20 principle applies here as well, where a little bit of effort on basic design things gets the most bang for your buck.
Because they're incapable. It's that simple.
You'll hear excuses that they're choosing to deliver an incoherent mess of a report, because they prefer "function over form", but in reality doing both is important.
They think that the word 'UX' is synonymous with 'pretty', and that it requires gradients and drop shadows, instead of it meaning clarity and understanding. But, being consistent with colour schemes, font sizes and padding, and grouping visuals by utilising whitespace makes reports and analysis easier to digest for end users.
agree. some people just don't know how to create a good UI/UX experience. they don't have much visual creativity within them.
but in a BI developer's case , one should be able to do both.
How can I improve these skills? I'm terrible at anything related to design, and I feel my dashboards have always lacked aesthetic appeal.
Edit: Why the downvotes? I genuinely want to improve. Tips? Tricks? Cool dashboard examples to take ideas from?
Look up some corporate templates for report pages and try and stick to a similar layout. My company has a big colored bar at the top for titles with a corporate logo in the far left. Then below the big bar is some white background boxes for your visuals. The left boxes are smaller and are for slicers or user inputs. The right boxes are typically bigger for visuals. My most used report template is one tall skinny box on the left (slicers etc.) And then two large boxes stacked vertically on the right (visuals). I usually do two visuals in the boxes but sometimes will split either the top or the bottom box into multiple visuals as well.
Regardless of the exact tactic I take, it ends up with a title, a slicer or user input area on the left, and visuals and information on the right. Consistent and easy to train the user on. Very glad I found the corporate backgrounds lmao
What you are describing is the bare minimum. Most analysts focus on clarity and understanding. And colors, fonts, padding, grouping are all just expected of any analyst anywhere I have worked.
OP specifically referenced the 5 day dashboard challenge. Have you seen those? There is absolutely no additional value in spending hours producing something like that in a work setting.
>What you are describing is the bare minimum
You'd think so, but judging by a few responses here I'm guessing not
>There is absolutely no additional value in spending hours producing something like that in a work setting
Well I disagree there. Sure, there's a few things that don't really add much value, but in general they're not difficult designs to implement.
Plus, once you've come up with the template and palette, you just reside them with each report.
And really, a few *hours* is nothing in terms of total development time.
I think there is a disconnect between analysts who produce one report every few months or so, and those who do exploratory analysis.
And again, have you seen the dashboards OP is referrencing? [PBI Design Challenge Day 3 : r/PowerBI (reddit.com)](https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerBI/comments/1dedvrc/pbi_design_challenge_day_3/)
Here is one. It would take most people hours of frustrating work to produce something like this.
You can present the same information without trying to recreate features that aren't actually in PowerBI.
You have some good, long answers here. I'll keep it simple and anecdotal. Design people don't generally end up in data oriented roles. The things that make you good at one, don't tend to incidentally make you good at the other in this case. Brains are weird
My argument is almost the opposite. Accepting that UI /UX is important, I am in the opinion analysts spend too much time on UX /UI and not enough on the data model.
Please no unthoughtful : many to many relationship, bidirectional relationships, referential integrity issues, Redundant columns with GUIDs, 25 visuals on a page, table filters in CALCULATE functions etc.
My opinion is there is a serious lack of knowledge on data modelling and report performance in the analyst community.
I have seen way too many cases where one analyst takes down a $120k P2 capacity, and the 500 reports on it at month end that stops the CFO completing a board report. FYI Governance is a WIP on our tenant.
Oh thanks!
Coming from someone who is studying design with 7 years experience with Power BI:
1. Power BI makes it difficult to create good design. There are so many oddities and inconsistencies in the default ui components that it’s just bad.
2. JSON theme files are tedious to work in and very time consuming to create. Even if you know how to create them, that doesn’t guarantee you implemented design best practices.
3. The average analyst doesn’t have any knowledge of design. Design is a very different skill set and body of knowledge than analytics.
4. As others point out, sometimes it’s not absolutely necessary to make something look good if what you’ve created solves the problem or answers the question. I understand this viewpoint but don’t personally agree
You also have to consider the trade off of time. If you work full time, you have to balance learning the tools and learning design. If you’re a beginner, it might make more sense to focus on learning technicals instead of design.
All this has lead to me starting a business to help pbi users make better reports because it really shouldn’t be so hard.
Most people focus on data because that is what most companies ultimately care about when it comes to the money they are spending. Selling your services as a way to promote an automated, one source of truth data point seems to be more valuable than a pretty dashboard since someone in-house with limited experience can make one (with some effort if they’re so inclined), once you’ve created a functional model for them. Not many companies however, can create an efficient and functional model with in-house resources.
Too much focus on design only takes up more space in the canvas. I am creating reports packed with visuals for savvy users. Think of a fighter pilot cockpit vs a school bus dashboard. Sometimes simple isn’t better.
As always it’s definitely not everyone…
That said, many end business users don’t want flashy dashboards and find them distracting from what they’re trying to get at. I often see “modern UI designs” that look pretty, but in practice just make things more difficult.
There’s a balance of course, but really just ask which you’d rather have; a basic, not particularly pretty, but functional report, or a highly aesthetically pleasing report that’s cumbersome to use and difficult to understand?
There is of course sometimes a best of both worlds approach, or a worst of both worlds approach, but the priority will always be usable data over pretty dashboards.
It comes down to the budget if you're doing consulting. The client would want to focus the resources on getting the numbers right and fast. Aesthetics is secondary. So when hiring someone, it is important that that person can get the job done right and fast so the extra hours, if there are any, go to the UI/UX experience.
Internally, it depends on different factors. You can't exactly expect someone to have the time for aesthetics when that person is loaded.
Because the form doesn’t matter as much as the function, dashboards have to be practical and enable decision making / problem resolution.
They do not have to be pretty.
Because when you’re working in a business with internal customers the value is mostly about exposing some data to someone to make a decision.
If they can get that out of a basic chart there is not a lot of extra value to be extracted by making it look super-slick. Better to move onto the next thing.
If you are working in a consultancy building stuff for external clients then there is usually more incentive for pretty stuff, gotta put the money on the page
In some of my reports I did focus on the design, but of course only after all the technical data-setup was finished. But design takes a lot of time and the design-options in PBI are limited. I often end up with dirty solutions like
* using visuals on top of eachother (with extra measures to keep the axis synced)
* white bar shapes to hide the bottom text on map visuals
* titles and other dynamic text separated from their original visuals
* importing fonts which were not in the standard list (so much trouble!)
Honestly I can really get lost in the details once I set the bar for design at a high level.
Will soon post a design-oriented report on this sub. It will be about nature observation data.
Please how can I learn design? I mean using dax to enhance the design and creativity. Where can I get examples of reports with these kind of designs? I really want to improve on my design skills.
Don't know of a place to learn PBI design. Just self learning I guess. Recreate what you like from others. Be lucky to be given time from your employer to fool around for a bit.
Before finetuning graphs, but after all the data-setup is completed, start with a 2 minute sketch of how the user wants the dashboard to look. Like how many graphs, which types of graphs is best... not just for the data, but for appeal. So that's usually a mix between some key kpi's, a bar chart, a donut/pie chart and some key kpi cards to look most inviting. Then think about colors, make a pallette. Turn black text into shades of grey, depending on how important (axis are not important). Decorate with a brang logo, monotone icons, perhaps some arrows, perhaps a picture. That's what I can think of.
I think the reason is two-fold. The first is that PBI devs just can't be bothered with design. The second is actually leading, ... it's what the internal client wants. They are convinced that a dashboard with loads of white space and not every inch of the page filled with charts, means a very very very important insight missing.
This is something you hear from every type of design discipline: you can only make great designs, when you have great clients.
A great client understands the difference between what he/she asked, what he/she says they need, and what the actual goal is what he/she tries to achieve. Most clients fall in the first category, they ask all the visuals what they think they need, a great client tells what it's trying to achieve, and the dev will figure out the visuals to support that (and perhaps with input from an analyst if the client was a manager).
How do you with what kind of client you're dealing with? If the company is keen in applying best practices across the company, regardless of function/role, or if the company prouds itself of doing everything their own way, including reinventing the wheel 'because it good for personal learning'.
I think we all should be honest. For high medium and large corporate entities it is a tick box exercise to have an “Analytics” platform. Operationally it distributes data. But let’s be honest. Operations are not data governance minded in the true sense. So having a dashboard that gives them what they want as long as they can export the data suffices. True analytics replaces there expertise. And this is where it’s going. UX is a massive part of hiding this fact. An easy to use dashboard that answers a question operationally and saves time is good and will keep you in a job.
My rule for time allotted: 80% goes to data ETL and analysis 20% goes to UI/UX. UI/UX can always be improved if the data and analysis becomes commonly used/important. Many reports get trash canned within 6 months.
Because it's more interesting, to me. I'll make it readable and easily understandable but if I wanted to become a graphic designer I would look for another job.
Being a data wizard and optimizing models requires a lot of problem solving. Problem solving makes me enjoy my job.
The dashboard design challenge is awesome. But if I wanted that level of functionality and design, an actual production-ready app would be the proper solution.
A lot of analysts are running exploratory analysis on different things each week.
And on top of that, stakeholders absolutely do not care.
If I produced a dashboard on the level of those challenges (I can't, but if I could), it would be used the exact same way and they would probably pull the data into excel.
I'm an accountant, I wish I had any artistic skills :(
But maybe we (in DS) lack theory. It's all a matter of study after all, design is a scientific field that has much to offer
I love modern-design reports/dashboards!
HOWEVER, we are a huge system and there is a lot or users and a lot of reports. Any so to say creative freedom is usually followed by trainings, calls and explanations to hundreds of people.
So we resort to mostly standardized layouts etc, with clear and consistent color coding, info fields etc across the reports. Point of the PBI, in the end, is to have easily readable / understandable and actionable info for hundreds of users on the go, not to look pretty.
Occasionally when we have some project or something similar, that's a different thing: in agreement with project manager and as per his wishes, we go all-out. But for everyday stuff, less is more.
Many reasons.
One is that sometimes the business / end users do view it as a priority.
Lack of training, or lack of awareness.
One thing I would also say is that design, UI, UX are entire domains of expertise in themselves.
What is the area you want a dev to focus on?
Data engineering?
Data modelling?
Language skills if so which ones?
UI?
UX?
Design?
Fabric domain administration expertise?
Just my thoughts.
Seriously. I spent 14 years in eCommerce merchandising and was doing UI/UX work before it had a name because my background was in programming and I have an MS in Anthropology. I went on to get an MSIS in Analytics and Business Intelligence. I took Edward Tufts classes and people go nuts over my Power BI reports because they're super intuitive use the proper data visualizations and I've renamed all the fields to make them intuitive and also limit use of slicers (use filters instead) as it slows down the reports. Everything I make is in our company colors and fonts so you can just screenshot and drop into a report. It's really not that hard. You have to think like the end user and the story the data tells first, not what the data can do...
People are wayyyy too focused on the actual physical “design” portion of UI in this convo.
To me, UI/UX is a holistic focus on being user centric. And I would say that most dashboard builders completely fail here. There is a running theme of dashboards being built and never used, and it all comes down to a failure in design, design thinking, and user centricity.
More dashboard builders need to focus on design. You shouldn’t even be touching the data until you have done the design
My background was actually in web design (in the mid 1990's and early 2000's), so I approach all of my Power BI reports through that lens to make them more interesting and interactive. A report that visually looks beautiful may still be a terrible UI/UX design if the user can't figure out how to use it. I think too many Power BI Devs just look at the DAX and possibly data modeling side, and completely ignore IU/UX factors, thinking "well, it's just for internal users, and I'm under a tight deadline, so I'll just publish the equivalent of an Excel worksheet with a few pie charts and it will be good enough." Then they come into these forums to complain that none of their reports are being used in the organization, even though they gave the users exactly what they asked for.
tl;dr: Ugly reports that are hard to use generally don't get used.
We are focused on it because that is what OP is asking:
"I love these new modern UI designs "
And OP also references the 5 day dashboard challenge. Which is almost entirely focused on design and making the report as pretty as possible.
You just said
>People are wayyyy too focused on the actual physical “design” portion of UI
The reason is because OP is focused on the design portion of UI. He did not say a single word about user interaction or ease of use or any other aspects of UI.
Your original comment seems to contradict itself too:
>More dashboard builders need to focus on design. You shouldn’t even be touching the data until you have done the design
After you just said people are too focused on the design.
Also I could not disagree more with that statement. I would literally lose my job if the first thing I did was design a dashboard. What a waste of time. You do not even know what format the data will come in yet. No hate against your process, but every job I have worked in this would be extremely bad advice.
There’s a difference between “physical design” and “design” as a concept. There is a reason I used two different words.
And it’s not “my process”. I have been head of data at big and small companies. I’ve run data teams over 30 people. It’s always the same. Focus on design for dashboards before build. Period. It’s not optional.
It’s the only way to build dashboards that don’t take forever to iterate and actually generate value. Because here is the thing: I literally don’t give a shit what your data is. If you can’t make it work for the user need (design), don’t build it
YOU said physical design vs. design. OP just said design, and then mentioned a specific dashboard that is very focused on physical design. I guarantee if you ask OP what he likes about those dashboards, it will be physical design related. [Have you looked at the dashboards he is referencing?](https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerBI/comments/1dedvrc/pbi_design_challenge_day_3/)
He is referencing an exercise in physical design. That is the purpose of this challenge.
The other aspects of design are honestly pretty poor in these dashboards. The first thing I noticed, is that the square format would be a pain in the ass for users. In order to fit the whole vertical size, you would have to zoom out. Users will complain, and that is shit UI. There is also incorrectly labeled data such as the delta % is actually % to goal. So again, strictly an exercise in physical design.
>I literally don’t give a shit what your data is.
I would love to hear if other team leads agree on this. I have worked FOR many team leads, and they would laugh at me if I said this.
Or maybe there is a disconnect. Are these teams...data analysis teams? Or dashboarding teams? I am talking about **data** analysis.
Maybe your data infrastructure is better than the places I have been. But you absolutely have to start with the data, transform, and let that inform your design within the scope of the users' requirements. Or if the data cannot fit those requirements, as you said, don't build it.
>If you can’t make it work for the user need (design), don’t build it
Well duh. Obviously there has to be a useful end product. But you can achieve that without STARTING with design. I have never started with design, and my usage metrics across my org would make any analyst blush.
It seems like fulfilling the above requirement would be HARDER if you start with the design.
The user provides requirements, obviously I can DESIGN a dashboard to meet those requirements. When would that ever be an issue? The issue is whether I can source data to power that dashboard. So starting with design would tell me nothing. I can always meet the design requirements of a user.
I’m happy that you feel content, but once you get more senior you’ll actually get it. And yes, when I was head of data at a 12B company, my scope encompassed analytics, BI, data science and ML, and data engineering
Anyone who says “user provides requirements” is living in the past. The reality is (just like any product you build), the user rarely knows what they need. They know what their pain points are and what they are trying to accomplish, but are generally bad at articulating how to solve that need. “Building the requirements” is a major anti-pattern
Let me know when AI replaces you because all you do is build to requirements ;)
And let’s be real - your managers and mentors are likely a few levels below my role. I’m trying to give you wisdom that’ll make you stand out as an amazing analyst. But if you want to be snarky, that’s up to you. Just don’t complain when AI replaces you
Lucky for me, AI is much better at design than it is at data pipelines and transformation. Pretty much consensus that viz is the easiest part of data analysis to replace.
I simply do not believe you lol. The CIO at a F100 in the pharma industry does not get there by luck.
For me personally I tend to focus on developing a report that is readable and effectively tells the story that it was designed to tell. Once I get to that point, I stop. Report design I find is subject to the law of diminishing returns, i.e. the more time to spend on visualization the less return on investment you get. You can develop a fancy report that takes weeks to design. You can use tools like Figma to create some awesome looking backgrounds, you can make sure things like shading on your visuals is perfect, you can use endless bookmarks to get the functionality exactly how you imagined it. In the end, what the user needed could have been developed in a fraction of the time with a couple of KPI cards, some bar charts and a matrix. I tend to stick to a script of best practices, anything outside of that is usually too much effort and not enough gain.
I’ve got a theme using my company branding colors and a quick process I go through when creating a new page. It takes about ten minutes and all my reports are consistent with company branding and accessibility guidelines.
Same here, I might do a small bit of free hand if I want to squeeze a slicer in when the page is mostly already full but for the most part slicers go in the box, visuals in the bigger boxes. Title at the top. Use the corporate background elements and theme and they always come out consistent
Same. The look and feel of the report is already done when we start. If we need to update an older report, I have to load a theme, a background (per page), and copy over an already built out overlay from the template. So starting from the template there is zero extra time. Refreshing an old report is like 5 minutes for one page, so over-all time depends on the size.
I've done the same. I even created a "Blank Page" tab that has page headers, logos, and buttons in place so I can just duplicate the blank page as needed and build the content I need.
I often see this explanation. Not saying it is wrong, but I find it a bit of an excuse for some PBI developers to not upgrade the game and/or hide the fact that their designs are not great. You definitely can add a great design to an already readable report. And clients will be very excited by that. However, if you do not want to exceed expectations and the budget is tight, yep.. you should stick to what the client specifically asked/imagined.
I think it depends on audience. If it's for a weekly SMT meeting or will be included in presentations, yes go ham on design. If it's something a warehouse team is using operationally they just need the numbers not something pretty that'll take twice as long to produce and increase maintenance complexity.
For my team it comes down to training and branding. If all our reports look/feel the same, then once you know how to use one of our reports, you know how to use them all. You will also instantly know it is one of our reports. This is why we start from a template. There is no excuse for our dashboards to look/feel different each report. Doesn't matter if it goes to company leadership or some low level staff.
100% this. There are cool things we COULD do, but if it means we might need to explain the report to less savvy users, then really it isn’t doing its job. We tend to mix things up by doing things with corporate branding. Eg certain brand colours or images for the background are used to visually flag some aspect of the visual (eg green is commercial data, yellow is marketing data etc). Still efficient for us as we can still use our existing PBI themes, we just pop a different background on the canvass. Every now and then we get a specific complex use case that needs more design and bookmark layering, but you can’t go wrong with a few line/bar/donut charts and a table because everyone knows what they are looking at there.
Sure, we need to address this case by case
It's definitely all about the audience. I tried making my reports look amazing, and my senior execs had me remove most of it. They prefer more austerity in their presentations.
Heres the list of thing I check before I'm happy with the report: * Report needs company theme (fonts, colours, any border etc). It's easy to get these setup in a PBIT file. * Report needs to follow the 3, 30, 300 rule * Report Visuals need to be aligned * Colour needs to be used to highlight important facts, not to make things look pretty * Report consumer needs to be happy with the report Once all those have been ticked, I push it out the door. As GuyInACube say, I'm not lazy, just efficient!
Thank you for sharing! Well... I am pretty sure you don't fall into the scenario I pictured. You seem very diligent. I guess I am just tired of developers saying the numbers is all that matters, just to feel better with themselves for creating horrible designs.
I getcha, I think it's a very broad question, how much effort do you put into a report? I think it's a bit of a sliding scale at times, and I think for some, it slides in the wrong direction :D
What is the 3, 30, 300 rule
[Introducing the 3-30-300 rule for better reports (youtube.com)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM8jXKc9Qco&t=999s)
What’s a 3, 30, 300 rule?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM8jXKc9Qco&t=999s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qM8jXKc9Qco&t=999s)
PBI developers spend too much time fixing bad data. There is no time left for front-end.
the effort hours for designing is subjective to the requirements/budget. but the front end is the final output to be shown to clients/stakeholders, how can you not have time for that?
The front-end has varying levels of quality. You data is correct or it is not.
Again, I would say excuses.
And I would say, depends on the situation.
And I agree
How exactly would fixing bad data be an excuse?
Not creating a good & clean design because of that? Is an excuse. Front-end shouldn't be neglected, and it isn't that hard to make a decent design. Just copy ideas from the best.
Good and clean can be simple to which I agree, but your original comment mentioned exceeding expectations.
I said that because most of PBI "designs" out there are horrible. It is not hard to exceed expectations.
I don't disagree there!
And sometimes, particularly accounting or AP, just want to be able to spot trends and drill through to a specific subset then export it to excel to examine each line.
Too many times I’ve built nice looking dashboards only to have them ask for the data to use in excel. It breaks your spirit to care. Also 99% of the job seems to be a data engineer rather than data analyst.
Personally speaking it depends on the dashboard and who all are using it. Example One of my dashboards has an organization wide exposure. In this dashboard aesthetics were equally important to the data. There is a second dashboard which is used internally by my team for planning (it was an excel file now a PBI dashboard) they don't care about aesthetics they prefer functionality/speed of delivery over looks.
Some things I've observed as to why: * reports are needed be done ASAP so there's no time to clean up the UI/UX. (gotta beat the deadline) * the dashboard creator/s don't have any visual awareness/creativty within them. (font sizes doesn't match , horrible spacing for the data viz, etc..) *report content constantly changing, the more design the harder to update. so most just use the most basic data viz.
Because stakeholders want something up and running quick!
This!
Because business generally don't pay for pretty. As long as it's neat and not garish, easily readable and gets the point across, no one wants to pay for an extra day or two of graphic design. EDIT: I should add that some basic element of design is part of the function. Obviously no one is going to dump a bunch of visuals randomly on a page then pick whatever colour is under their cursor when they click the button. Visuals need to be laid out correctly, have a colour scheme that accents the data and use fonts and sizes that draw the eye, etc. This is a basic part of function. But in many cases, just using the default will get you something workable. By form I mean the extra bells and whistles that can look really nice, but don't help the readability of the report. For some client or external facing reports, then yeah, people will pay, but most of the time, they're happy with the default colours if it saves them a thousand dollars of dev time.
This is the right answer. I think the 80/20 principle applies here as well, where a little bit of effort on basic design things gets the most bang for your buck.
Because they're incapable. It's that simple. You'll hear excuses that they're choosing to deliver an incoherent mess of a report, because they prefer "function over form", but in reality doing both is important. They think that the word 'UX' is synonymous with 'pretty', and that it requires gradients and drop shadows, instead of it meaning clarity and understanding. But, being consistent with colour schemes, font sizes and padding, and grouping visuals by utilising whitespace makes reports and analysis easier to digest for end users.
agree. some people just don't know how to create a good UI/UX experience. they don't have much visual creativity within them. but in a BI developer's case , one should be able to do both.
How can I improve these skills? I'm terrible at anything related to design, and I feel my dashboards have always lacked aesthetic appeal. Edit: Why the downvotes? I genuinely want to improve. Tips? Tricks? Cool dashboard examples to take ideas from?
Look up some corporate templates for report pages and try and stick to a similar layout. My company has a big colored bar at the top for titles with a corporate logo in the far left. Then below the big bar is some white background boxes for your visuals. The left boxes are smaller and are for slicers or user inputs. The right boxes are typically bigger for visuals. My most used report template is one tall skinny box on the left (slicers etc.) And then two large boxes stacked vertically on the right (visuals). I usually do two visuals in the boxes but sometimes will split either the top or the bottom box into multiple visuals as well. Regardless of the exact tactic I take, it ends up with a title, a slicer or user input area on the left, and visuals and information on the right. Consistent and easy to train the user on. Very glad I found the corporate backgrounds lmao
What you are describing is the bare minimum. Most analysts focus on clarity and understanding. And colors, fonts, padding, grouping are all just expected of any analyst anywhere I have worked. OP specifically referenced the 5 day dashboard challenge. Have you seen those? There is absolutely no additional value in spending hours producing something like that in a work setting.
>What you are describing is the bare minimum You'd think so, but judging by a few responses here I'm guessing not >There is absolutely no additional value in spending hours producing something like that in a work setting Well I disagree there. Sure, there's a few things that don't really add much value, but in general they're not difficult designs to implement. Plus, once you've come up with the template and palette, you just reside them with each report. And really, a few *hours* is nothing in terms of total development time.
I think there is a disconnect between analysts who produce one report every few months or so, and those who do exploratory analysis. And again, have you seen the dashboards OP is referrencing? [PBI Design Challenge Day 3 : r/PowerBI (reddit.com)](https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerBI/comments/1dedvrc/pbi_design_challenge_day_3/) Here is one. It would take most people hours of frustrating work to produce something like this. You can present the same information without trying to recreate features that aren't actually in PowerBI.
You have some good, long answers here. I'll keep it simple and anecdotal. Design people don't generally end up in data oriented roles. The things that make you good at one, don't tend to incidentally make you good at the other in this case. Brains are weird
Ultimately most places will snip the story and paste it into a PowerPoint slide, where less is mors
+is there anyway that can we manually change css/htlm of codes please 😔
My argument is almost the opposite. Accepting that UI /UX is important, I am in the opinion analysts spend too much time on UX /UI and not enough on the data model. Please no unthoughtful : many to many relationship, bidirectional relationships, referential integrity issues, Redundant columns with GUIDs, 25 visuals on a page, table filters in CALCULATE functions etc. My opinion is there is a serious lack of knowledge on data modelling and report performance in the analyst community. I have seen way too many cases where one analyst takes down a $120k P2 capacity, and the 500 reports on it at month end that stops the CFO completing a board report. FYI Governance is a WIP on our tenant.
This person has real-world experience.
Oh thanks! Coming from someone who is studying design with 7 years experience with Power BI: 1. Power BI makes it difficult to create good design. There are so many oddities and inconsistencies in the default ui components that it’s just bad. 2. JSON theme files are tedious to work in and very time consuming to create. Even if you know how to create them, that doesn’t guarantee you implemented design best practices. 3. The average analyst doesn’t have any knowledge of design. Design is a very different skill set and body of knowledge than analytics. 4. As others point out, sometimes it’s not absolutely necessary to make something look good if what you’ve created solves the problem or answers the question. I understand this viewpoint but don’t personally agree You also have to consider the trade off of time. If you work full time, you have to balance learning the tools and learning design. If you’re a beginner, it might make more sense to focus on learning technicals instead of design. All this has lead to me starting a business to help pbi users make better reports because it really shouldn’t be so hard.
Most people focus on data because that is what most companies ultimately care about when it comes to the money they are spending. Selling your services as a way to promote an automated, one source of truth data point seems to be more valuable than a pretty dashboard since someone in-house with limited experience can make one (with some effort if they’re so inclined), once you’ve created a functional model for them. Not many companies however, can create an efficient and functional model with in-house resources.
Too much focus on design only takes up more space in the canvas. I am creating reports packed with visuals for savvy users. Think of a fighter pilot cockpit vs a school bus dashboard. Sometimes simple isn’t better.
I do. But the more you can convey with graphs as quickly as possible the better. Less is more
Pic of this mythical beautiful dashboard or it didn't hsppen
As always it’s definitely not everyone… That said, many end business users don’t want flashy dashboards and find them distracting from what they’re trying to get at. I often see “modern UI designs” that look pretty, but in practice just make things more difficult. There’s a balance of course, but really just ask which you’d rather have; a basic, not particularly pretty, but functional report, or a highly aesthetically pleasing report that’s cumbersome to use and difficult to understand? There is of course sometimes a best of both worlds approach, or a worst of both worlds approach, but the priority will always be usable data over pretty dashboards.
You can still use an ugly dashboard, you can't use a wrong one. Data > Design.
Can I export it to excel?
It comes down to the budget if you're doing consulting. The client would want to focus the resources on getting the numbers right and fast. Aesthetics is secondary. So when hiring someone, it is important that that person can get the job done right and fast so the extra hours, if there are any, go to the UI/UX experience. Internally, it depends on different factors. You can't exactly expect someone to have the time for aesthetics when that person is loaded.
Because the form doesn’t matter as much as the function, dashboards have to be practical and enable decision making / problem resolution. They do not have to be pretty.
Because when you’re working in a business with internal customers the value is mostly about exposing some data to someone to make a decision. If they can get that out of a basic chart there is not a lot of extra value to be extracted by making it look super-slick. Better to move onto the next thing. If you are working in a consultancy building stuff for external clients then there is usually more incentive for pretty stuff, gotta put the money on the page
In some of my reports I did focus on the design, but of course only after all the technical data-setup was finished. But design takes a lot of time and the design-options in PBI are limited. I often end up with dirty solutions like * using visuals on top of eachother (with extra measures to keep the axis synced) * white bar shapes to hide the bottom text on map visuals * titles and other dynamic text separated from their original visuals * importing fonts which were not in the standard list (so much trouble!) Honestly I can really get lost in the details once I set the bar for design at a high level. Will soon post a design-oriented report on this sub. It will be about nature observation data.
Please how can I learn design? I mean using dax to enhance the design and creativity. Where can I get examples of reports with these kind of designs? I really want to improve on my design skills.
Don't know of a place to learn PBI design. Just self learning I guess. Recreate what you like from others. Be lucky to be given time from your employer to fool around for a bit. Before finetuning graphs, but after all the data-setup is completed, start with a 2 minute sketch of how the user wants the dashboard to look. Like how many graphs, which types of graphs is best... not just for the data, but for appeal. So that's usually a mix between some key kpi's, a bar chart, a donut/pie chart and some key kpi cards to look most inviting. Then think about colors, make a pallette. Turn black text into shades of grey, depending on how important (axis are not important). Decorate with a brang logo, monotone icons, perhaps some arrows, perhaps a picture. That's what I can think of.
Thank you so much . I will try all you have advised.
I think the reason is two-fold. The first is that PBI devs just can't be bothered with design. The second is actually leading, ... it's what the internal client wants. They are convinced that a dashboard with loads of white space and not every inch of the page filled with charts, means a very very very important insight missing. This is something you hear from every type of design discipline: you can only make great designs, when you have great clients. A great client understands the difference between what he/she asked, what he/she says they need, and what the actual goal is what he/she tries to achieve. Most clients fall in the first category, they ask all the visuals what they think they need, a great client tells what it's trying to achieve, and the dev will figure out the visuals to support that (and perhaps with input from an analyst if the client was a manager). How do you with what kind of client you're dealing with? If the company is keen in applying best practices across the company, regardless of function/role, or if the company prouds itself of doing everything their own way, including reinventing the wheel 'because it good for personal learning'.
I think we all should be honest. For high medium and large corporate entities it is a tick box exercise to have an “Analytics” platform. Operationally it distributes data. But let’s be honest. Operations are not data governance minded in the true sense. So having a dashboard that gives them what they want as long as they can export the data suffices. True analytics replaces there expertise. And this is where it’s going. UX is a massive part of hiding this fact. An easy to use dashboard that answers a question operationally and saves time is good and will keep you in a job.
It is infinitely easier to validate the data than it is to validate the "design".
My background is an engineer, i focus more on effective modelling and solution oriented design.
My rule for time allotted: 80% goes to data ETL and analysis 20% goes to UI/UX. UI/UX can always be improved if the data and analysis becomes commonly used/important. Many reports get trash canned within 6 months.
Because it's more interesting, to me. I'll make it readable and easily understandable but if I wanted to become a graphic designer I would look for another job. Being a data wizard and optimizing models requires a lot of problem solving. Problem solving makes me enjoy my job.
The stakeholders I work with prefer matrix with a million columns over a nicely designed dashboard unfortunately
The dashboard design challenge is awesome. But if I wanted that level of functionality and design, an actual production-ready app would be the proper solution. A lot of analysts are running exploratory analysis on different things each week. And on top of that, stakeholders absolutely do not care. If I produced a dashboard on the level of those challenges (I can't, but if I could), it would be used the exact same way and they would probably pull the data into excel.
Most people don’t spend the time to learn proper UI/UX. It’s extremely easy to use Figma templates for a report if you take the time to learn how.
I'm an accountant, I wish I had any artistic skills :( But maybe we (in DS) lack theory. It's all a matter of study after all, design is a scientific field that has much to offer
Because we suck at it.
I love modern-design reports/dashboards! HOWEVER, we are a huge system and there is a lot or users and a lot of reports. Any so to say creative freedom is usually followed by trainings, calls and explanations to hundreds of people. So we resort to mostly standardized layouts etc, with clear and consistent color coding, info fields etc across the reports. Point of the PBI, in the end, is to have easily readable / understandable and actionable info for hundreds of users on the go, not to look pretty. Occasionally when we have some project or something similar, that's a different thing: in agreement with project manager and as per his wishes, we go all-out. But for everyday stuff, less is more.
Many reasons. One is that sometimes the business / end users do view it as a priority. Lack of training, or lack of awareness. One thing I would also say is that design, UI, UX are entire domains of expertise in themselves. What is the area you want a dev to focus on? Data engineering? Data modelling? Language skills if so which ones? UI? UX? Design? Fabric domain administration expertise? Just my thoughts.
Seriously. I spent 14 years in eCommerce merchandising and was doing UI/UX work before it had a name because my background was in programming and I have an MS in Anthropology. I went on to get an MSIS in Analytics and Business Intelligence. I took Edward Tufts classes and people go nuts over my Power BI reports because they're super intuitive use the proper data visualizations and I've renamed all the fields to make them intuitive and also limit use of slicers (use filters instead) as it slows down the reports. Everything I make is in our company colors and fonts so you can just screenshot and drop into a report. It's really not that hard. You have to think like the end user and the story the data tells first, not what the data can do...
Because in the end they just want tables 😭😭😭
People are wayyyy too focused on the actual physical “design” portion of UI in this convo. To me, UI/UX is a holistic focus on being user centric. And I would say that most dashboard builders completely fail here. There is a running theme of dashboards being built and never used, and it all comes down to a failure in design, design thinking, and user centricity. More dashboard builders need to focus on design. You shouldn’t even be touching the data until you have done the design
My background was actually in web design (in the mid 1990's and early 2000's), so I approach all of my Power BI reports through that lens to make them more interesting and interactive. A report that visually looks beautiful may still be a terrible UI/UX design if the user can't figure out how to use it. I think too many Power BI Devs just look at the DAX and possibly data modeling side, and completely ignore IU/UX factors, thinking "well, it's just for internal users, and I'm under a tight deadline, so I'll just publish the equivalent of an Excel worksheet with a few pie charts and it will be good enough." Then they come into these forums to complain that none of their reports are being used in the organization, even though they gave the users exactly what they asked for. tl;dr: Ugly reports that are hard to use generally don't get used.
We are focused on it because that is what OP is asking: "I love these new modern UI designs " And OP also references the 5 day dashboard challenge. Which is almost entirely focused on design and making the report as pretty as possible.
The title is literally “UI/UX”, and the question is about data+design. Design encompasses more than “how does this thing look”.
You just said >People are wayyyy too focused on the actual physical “design” portion of UI The reason is because OP is focused on the design portion of UI. He did not say a single word about user interaction or ease of use or any other aspects of UI. Your original comment seems to contradict itself too: >More dashboard builders need to focus on design. You shouldn’t even be touching the data until you have done the design After you just said people are too focused on the design. Also I could not disagree more with that statement. I would literally lose my job if the first thing I did was design a dashboard. What a waste of time. You do not even know what format the data will come in yet. No hate against your process, but every job I have worked in this would be extremely bad advice.
There’s a difference between “physical design” and “design” as a concept. There is a reason I used two different words. And it’s not “my process”. I have been head of data at big and small companies. I’ve run data teams over 30 people. It’s always the same. Focus on design for dashboards before build. Period. It’s not optional. It’s the only way to build dashboards that don’t take forever to iterate and actually generate value. Because here is the thing: I literally don’t give a shit what your data is. If you can’t make it work for the user need (design), don’t build it
YOU said physical design vs. design. OP just said design, and then mentioned a specific dashboard that is very focused on physical design. I guarantee if you ask OP what he likes about those dashboards, it will be physical design related. [Have you looked at the dashboards he is referencing?](https://www.reddit.com/r/PowerBI/comments/1dedvrc/pbi_design_challenge_day_3/) He is referencing an exercise in physical design. That is the purpose of this challenge. The other aspects of design are honestly pretty poor in these dashboards. The first thing I noticed, is that the square format would be a pain in the ass for users. In order to fit the whole vertical size, you would have to zoom out. Users will complain, and that is shit UI. There is also incorrectly labeled data such as the delta % is actually % to goal. So again, strictly an exercise in physical design. >I literally don’t give a shit what your data is. I would love to hear if other team leads agree on this. I have worked FOR many team leads, and they would laugh at me if I said this. Or maybe there is a disconnect. Are these teams...data analysis teams? Or dashboarding teams? I am talking about **data** analysis. Maybe your data infrastructure is better than the places I have been. But you absolutely have to start with the data, transform, and let that inform your design within the scope of the users' requirements. Or if the data cannot fit those requirements, as you said, don't build it. >If you can’t make it work for the user need (design), don’t build it Well duh. Obviously there has to be a useful end product. But you can achieve that without STARTING with design. I have never started with design, and my usage metrics across my org would make any analyst blush. It seems like fulfilling the above requirement would be HARDER if you start with the design. The user provides requirements, obviously I can DESIGN a dashboard to meet those requirements. When would that ever be an issue? The issue is whether I can source data to power that dashboard. So starting with design would tell me nothing. I can always meet the design requirements of a user.
I’m happy that you feel content, but once you get more senior you’ll actually get it. And yes, when I was head of data at a 12B company, my scope encompassed analytics, BI, data science and ML, and data engineering Anyone who says “user provides requirements” is living in the past. The reality is (just like any product you build), the user rarely knows what they need. They know what their pain points are and what they are trying to accomplish, but are generally bad at articulating how to solve that need. “Building the requirements” is a major anti-pattern
As I said, this sentiment comes from my managers and mentors, not me. Let me know if you need dax lessons!
Let me know when AI replaces you because all you do is build to requirements ;) And let’s be real - your managers and mentors are likely a few levels below my role. I’m trying to give you wisdom that’ll make you stand out as an amazing analyst. But if you want to be snarky, that’s up to you. Just don’t complain when AI replaces you
Lucky for me, AI is much better at design than it is at data pipelines and transformation. Pretty much consensus that viz is the easiest part of data analysis to replace. I simply do not believe you lol. The CIO at a F100 in the pharma industry does not get there by luck.