5 UX Best Practices for Power BI Reports

A good user experience is paramount to the success of a report.

Having a report with a poor UX is like having a Ferrari with no fuel in the tank. It has the potential to work, but lacks the final puzzle piece for it to meet its intended goal.

A good report UX design has the following benefits:

• Increased user adoption: When reports are easy to use and understand, users are more likely to use them on a regular basis. This can lead to improved decision-making.

• Improved efficiency: A well designed report can help users locate the information they need quickly and easily.

• Improved insights: A well designed report can help users identify trends and patterns in the data that they might not have noticed otherwise.

• Reduced errors: A good UX design can help reduce the number of errors that users make when generating and interpreting reports.

• Increased user satisfaction: When users have a positive experience with a report, they are more likely to be satisfied with the overall product or service. It can lead to increased loyalty and word of mouth marketing.

In the section below I will be going through some UX best practice tips to help you design and deliver a great Power BI report.

1) Design with the End-User in mind

This is a concept that often gets overlooked. When building a report it is easy to get all caught up in the nitty gritty aspects of the development work that we forget who our audience is and how the report will be used.

During the development process ask yourself the following questions:

• Do the visuals in the report make sense and are they easy to understand?

• Is the report responsive to user input, filtering, slicing and dicing?

• Does the report tell a story or are visuals randomly put together?

• Am I meeting the requirements set out by the user?

• Is it easy to navigate through the report and extract the insights needed?

Just remember, the best Power BI reports employ an enjoyable user experience, while delivering the intended insights the user is looking for.

2) Report Performance

Have you every clicked on a report and it takes so long to load that you get frustrated and eventually end up moving onto something else or stop using the report all together?

This is more common than you would think. There have been many cases, I have seen, where a report has been delivered to the client and upon checking the usage stats, I realised the report isn't being used. The most common answer? You guessed it..."the report is too slow and takes forever to load."

This is obviously a problem as it will deter users from using the report in future.

There are many things we can do to speed up a report and improve its performance:

• Use the Performance Analyzer to determine the speed of your DAX queries and how the visuals are performing.

• Improve your data model such as removing unnecessary columns, combining entities with one-to-one relationships and only loading the data that is needed in the report.

• When adding new columns, use Power Query instead of DAX as it allows for these columns to be compressed by the VertiPaq engine.

• Limit the amount of visuals in the report. There is no hard and fast rule but only add what is really necessary.

Report responsiveness and performance are everything, make sure to keep this in mind throughout the development life cycle.

3) Repeatedly test your report with Users

This may seem like it is common knowledge, but this part of the development life cycle often gets overlooked or ignored completely.

Once you have your first draft of the report it is important that you sit with the user and take them through what has been developed so far. In most cases the initial requirements that are set out often change or are misunderstood.

I make use of the Agile Development Methodology when building Power BI reports as depicted in the image below:

It is not good enough to develop the report and then wait for feedback from the user. Users need to be involved from the start as this approach has may benefits:

• Less back and fourth communication between user and developer.

• Faster delivery time as issues can be ironed out as they arise.

• Gain a better understanding of what the user needs which increases the effectiveness of the report.

• Helps build a relationship between the user and developer.

Testing your report with users is an iterative process that helps you deliver on the requirements effectively.

4) Use language that is clear and concise

Using technical lingo and jargon may seem cool at first, but may not be understood by your audience and can put them off.

We shouldn't assume that the users have a technical background and must aim to use language that is easy to understand, clear and targeted towards the user.

Any complex concepts should be explained as simply as possible as to avoid confusion.

5) Use interactive elements

Give users the ability to explore the data using interactive features built into the report.

An interactive report encourages exploration, making it easier for your audience to engage with the report and discover the insights they need.

Interactive elements include:

• Drill-downs

• Slicers

• Filters

• Buttons

• Tooltips

• Annotations

The ultimate goal is to drive engagement with the report. Adding interactive elements are a sure fire way to do this.

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Happy developing!